THE PROCESSING OF NUMBER AND GENDER AGREEMENT IN SPANISH: AN ERP INVESTIGATION

Abstract

The present ERP (Event-related Potential) study investigates how syntactic agreement is processed at the electrophysiological level, examining whether the parser is sensitive to the structural distance between the agreeing elements and whether different agreement categories (number, gender) are processed similarly. Participants read Spanish sentences while EEG (Electroencephalogram) was recorded from 29 scalp electrodes. Results show that number and gender agreement violations yielded a similar P600, a positive wave between 400 and 900ms peaking at 600ms. This ERP response is assumed to reflect the repair of morphosyntactic anomalies, including agreement mismatches (Osterhout & Mobley, 1995). Furthermore, no differences in P600 amplitude were observed for violations that were established across a syntactic phrase versus violations established within the same phrase. These results suggest that agreement is computed in a homogenous way regardless of the agreement category involved and of the syntactic distance between the agreeing elements.