Expecting gender: an event related brain potential study on the role of grammatical gender in comprehending a line drawing within a written sentence in Spanish

Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in written sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers read sentences in which a drawing depicting a target noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and either agreed or disagreed in gender with that of the preceding article. The gender-agreement violation at the drawing was associated with an enhanced negativity between 500 and 700 msec post-stimulus onset. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited a larger N400 than congruent drawings regardless of gender (dis)agreement, indicating little effect of grammatical gender agreement on contextual integration of a picture into a written sentence context. We also observed an enhanced negativity for articles with unexpected relative to expected gender based on prior sentence context indicating that readers generate expectations for specific nouns and their articles.

Fig. 1

Average ERPs for 4 midline electrodes from front to back of the head (geodesical electrode cap sites MiPf, MiCe, MiPa and MiOc; see Methods section) for the 4 experimental conditions overlapped. The waveform encompasses three stimuli in succession: the word prior to the article of interest (onset at 0 msec), the article (onset at 500 msec), and the target picture (onset at 1000 msec). The ERP to the word preceding the article is used as a baseline for illustrative purposes only; statistical analyses were performed for articles and pictures, separately, in each case using a 100 msec pre-stimulus baseline. Negative is plotted upwards on this and all subsequent figures.

Fig. 2

Representative grand average ERPs from 8 electrode sites (indicated by the X’s on the schematic head) from front to the back of the head to the picture targets. The left half of the figure shows the effect of semantic congruity; overlapped is the response to pictures that made sense in the sentence context (solid line) versus the response to those that did not (dashed line). Note the greater negativity to the incongruous pictures relative to the congruous ones from 200 ms throughout the recording epoch. The right half of the figure shows the effect of gender agreement between the article and the picture’s referent; overlapped is the response to the picture when its referent agrees in gender with that of the prior article (solid line) versus when it does not (dashed line). Note that gender mismatches are associated with a slightly greater negativity between 500 to 700 ms post picture onset.

Fig. 3

Grand average ERPs to target pictures from all 26 electrode sites (viewed looking down on the top of the head) in the four experimental conditions overlapped. Early sensory components are labeled at a right occipital site and the N400 is labeled at a midline parietal site (see Figure 5 for electrode–site labels).

Fig. 4

Difference ERPs from 8 electrodes – indicated on the schematic head – from front to back of the head illustrate the lack of interaction between semantic congruity and gender agreement. The left half of the figure shows that the effect of semantic congruity (incongruous minus congruous ERPs) is the same whether the picture’s referent matches or does not match in gender with that of the preceding article. The right half of the figure shows that the effect of gender agreement (mismatch minus match) is the same whether the target picture fit or did not fit with the meaning of the sentence context. The time window in which the gender agreement effect was significant (500 to 700 msec) is indicated between the two vertical dotted lines. None of the small differences in these difference ERPs are reliable.

Fig. 5

Grand average ERPs to the article preceding the target picture from all 26 electrode sites (viewed looking down on the top of the head) for the effect of gender expectancy (see Methods section for descriptors corresponding to the electrode–site label abbreviations). Early sensory components are labeled at a right occipital site and the N400 is labeled at a right parietal site. The effect is characterized by a widely distributed enhanced negativity for the contextually unexpected (dashed line) versus expected (solid line) articles in the region of the N400, slightly, though not significantly, larger over posterior sites on the left.

Fig. 6

Comparison of the distributions of potentials of the semantic congruity and gender agreement effects for the target pictures. In both cases, plotted are the potentials of the corresponding difference ERPs, for the mean activity between 250–350 msec for the effect of semantic congruity (incongruous minus congruous ERPs) and between 550–650 msec for the effect of gender agreement (mismatching minus matching gender); these 100 msec time windows encompass the maximum peak for each effect and are used in this figure for illustrative purposes only. Note that the effect of semantic congruity is maximal over right central sites whereas the effect of gender agreement has a more left fronto-central focus.