Elsevier Editorial System(tm) for Journal of Neurolinguistics Keywords: Comprehension -syntax -noun-verb Agreement -electrophysiology -lan -n400

نویسندگان

  • Viviane Deprez
  • Peter Ford
  • Claude Bernard
  • Michel HOEN
چکیده

With this research we investigated the real-time electrophysiological correlates of noun-verb agreement checking during the comprehension of normal passive sentences in French. Event-related potentials were acquired while participants read passive sentences that contained covert (singular, masculine) or overt (plural, feminine) noun verb agreement. Results show that the processing of agreeing verbs in passive sentences is associated with an asymmetrical electrophysiological response, reflecting former psycholinguistic evidence of markedness and unmarkedness of certain features. The reading of an overtly marked verb agreeing in number and gender with a feminine plural subject was associated with a left anterior negativity (LAN), whereas covertly marked verbs were associated with an absence of LAN response and a more central-posterior distributed negativity. These results, confirming the lexical status of features and their immediate but asymmetrical checking during sentence comprehension are discussed in the context of current linguistic and psycholinguistic models of agreement checking and the cerebral bases of syntactic processing.

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تاریخ انتشار 2006