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Dube S, Kung C, Peter V, et al. Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study. Front Psychol. 2016;7:1276doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276.
Dube, S., Kung, C., Peter, V., Brock, J., & Demuth, K. (2016). Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study. Frontiers in psychology, 71276. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276
Dube, Sithembinkosi, et al. "Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study." Frontiers in psychology vol. 7 (2016): 1276. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276
Dube S, Kung C, Peter V, Brock J, Demuth K. Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study. Front Psychol. 2016 Aug 30;7:1276. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276. eCollection 2016. PMID: 27625617; PMCID: PMC5003887.
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Front Psychol. 2016 Aug 30;7:1276. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276. eCollection 2016.

Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study.

Frontiers in psychology

Sithembinkosi Dube, Carmen Kung, Varghese Peter, Jon Brock, Katherine Demuth

Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia; ARC Centre for Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia.
  2. MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia.
  3. ARC Centre for Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia; Department of Cognitive Sciences, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia.
  4. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia; ARC Centre for Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie UniversitySydney, NSW, Australia; Santa Fe InstituteSanta Fe, NM, USA.

PMID: 27625617 PMCID: PMC5003887 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01276

Abstract

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components-LAN and P600-in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys (*) runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

Keywords: ERPs; auditory modality; subject-verb agreement; type of agreement violation; utterance position

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