Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension.
Many studies have provided evidence for the automaticity and immediacy with which stereotypical knowledge affects our behavior. However, less is known about how such social knowledge interacts with linguistic cues during comprehension. In this ERP sentence processing study we took advantage of the rich grammatical gender morphology of Spanish to explore the processing of role nouns in which stereotype and grammatical cues were simultaneously manipulated, in a factorial design. We show that stereotypical knowledge overrides syntactic cues, highlighting the immediacy with which stereotype knowledge is activated during language comprehension and supporting proposals claiming that social knowledge impacts on language processing differently from other forms of semantics.
BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 2 Floor, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain; Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Maria Diaz de Haro, 3, 6 Floor, 48013 Bilbao, Spain. Electronic address: n.molinaro@bcbl.eu.
Nicola
N
Molinaro
BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 2 Floor, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain. Electronic address: j.su@bcbl.eu.
Jui-Ju
JJ
Su
BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 2 Floor, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain; Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Maria Diaz de Haro, 3, 6 Floor, 48013 Bilbao, Spain. Electronic address: m.carreiras@bcbl.eu.
Manuel
M
Carreiras
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013239:Stereotyped Behavior
Event related potentials; Gender agreement; Gender stereotypes; N400; Sentence comprehension