Potato not Pope: human brain potentials to gender expectation and agreement in Spanish spoken sentences

Abstract

Event-related potentials were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in auditory sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers listened to sentence pairs in which a drawing depicting a noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and agreed or disagreed in gender with the immediately preceding spoken article. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited an N400 regardless of gender agreement. A similar negativity to prior articles of gender opposite to that of the contextually expected noun suggests that listeners predict specific words during comprehension. Gender disagreements at the drawing also elicited an increased negativity with a later onset and distribution distinct from the canonical N400, indicating that comprehenders attend to gender agreement, even when one of the words is only implicitly represented by a drawing.

Fig. 1

Examples of the sentences in the four experimental conditions.

Fig. 2

Grand average ERPs from eight representative sites (Xs on schematic head) to drawings showing the semantic-congruity effect across gender agreement and the gender-agreement effect across semantic congruity. Y-axis: amplitude in microvolts, negative polarity plotted up; X-axis: time with drawing onset at 0 ms.

Fig. 3

Grand average ERPs elicited by naturally spoken articles preceding the drawings from 16 representative electrodes, showing the gender expectation effect.

Fig. 4

Voltage maps (100 ms window) of the gender expectation effect (unexpected minus expected-gender ERP) at the article and semantic-congruity effect (semantically incongruent minus congruent ERP) at line drawing. Lighter to darker coloration indicates more negativity to more positivity, respectively.