The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance
The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance
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DOI：
10.1016/j.brainres.2012.03.057
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发表时间：
2012-05-25
期刊：
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Gabriele, Alison
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Banon, Jose Aleman;Fiorentino, Robert;Gabriele, Alison
以往的研究表明，一致性加工受到一致性要素之间距离的影响。然而，结构距离（插入句法短语的数量）对一致性加工的独特贡献仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，因为以前的研究没有将结构距离和线性距离（插入单词的数量）分开。我们使用事件相关电位（ERPs）来检查结构距离对西班牙语数字和性别一致性处理的影响程度。在短语内部和短语之间都存在违规行为。在结构距离的两个层次上，线性距离保持不变，同意成分的句法类别也是如此。数量和性别协议的侵犯引起了强大的P600之间的400和900毫秒，与morphosyntagical处理的一个组成部分。在数字和性别违规之间没有观察到幅度差异，这表明这两个特征在大脑水平上的处理相似。短语内协议产生了更多的积极波形比跨短语协议，无论是协议违反和语法句子（无协议的距离互动）。这些影响可以解释为证据表明，结构距离影响建立协议的整体，符合句子加工模型预测，层次结构影响处理的句法依赖。然而，由于缺乏距离相互作用的协议，不能排除的可能性，这些影响是由短语内和跨短语配置之间的句法可预测性的差异，特别是事实上，关键词的句法类别是更可预测的短语内的条件。(C)2012爱思唯尔有限公司版权所有。
Previous research suggests that the processing of agreement is affected by the distance between the agreeing elements. However, the unique contribution of structural distance (number of intervening syntactic phrases) to the processing of agreement remains an open question, since previous investigations do not tease apart structural and linear distance (number of intervening words). We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the extent to which structural distance impacts the processing of Spanish number and gender agreement. Violations were realized both within the phrase and across the phrase. Across both levels of structural distance, linear distance was kept constant, as was the syntactic category of the agreeing elements. Number and gender agreement violations elicited a robust P600 between 400 and 900 ms, a component associated with morphosyntactic processing. No amplitude differences were observed between number and gender violations, suggesting that the two features are processed similarly at the brain level. Within-phrase agreement yielded more positive waveforms than across-phrase agreement, both for agreement violations and for grammatical sentences (no agreement by distance interaction). These effects can be interpreted as evidence that structural distance impacts the establishment of agreement overall, consistent with sentence processing models which predict that hierarchical structure impacts the processing of syntactic dependencies. However, due to the lack of an agreement by distance interaction, the possibility cannot be ruled out that these effects are driven by differences in syntactic predictability between the within-phrase and across-phrase configurations, notably the fact that the syntactic category of the critical word was more predictable in the within-phrase conditions. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.