https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3192-0040
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ABSTRACT
Recent evidence indicates that emotion influences the computation of agreement dependencies based on number or gender. In this event-related potential study, we examined the role of emotion in the processing of person information. Participants made grammatical judgements to sentences with positive, negative and neutral verbs that either matched or mismatched person features of a preceding pronominal subject. Emotion did not modulate P600 amplitude enhancements to agreement violations. Importantly, whereas enhanced LAN effects to all ungrammatical sentences were observed in a cluster of left fronto-central electrodes, only neutral verbs that violated person agreement elicited enhanced LAN amplitudes in a sub-cluster of left frontal electrodes. The narrow distribution of LAN effects to emotion verbs suggests that feature-checking operations dealing with the early detection of person agreement errors are less efficient when words signal affective biologically salient content. Our results favour lexicalist views arguing that lexical and conceptual information influences agreement.
Acknowledgements
The author thank Cristina Villalba and Uxía Fernández-Folgueiras for their help in data collection.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data from the present study are publicly available at the Open Science Framework website: https://osf.io/5439g/.
Notes
1 As one reviewer noted, agreement errors always occurred following the sentence initial pronouns in both fillers and experimental sentences, which might have biased participants towards more word-pair based and less syntactically based processing.
2 Tanner and Van Hell (Citation2014) have suggested that biphasic LAN-P600 effects to verb agreement mismatches could be a result of grand mean responses from N400 (related to lexico-semantic processes) and P600 components since some individuals depicted centrally scalp distributed waveforms in the LAN time-window. However, this possibility seems unlikely in the current study since our data-driven analyses showed that the interaction between Grammaticality and Emotion reached significance in a cluster of left-frontal electrodes. Also, Tanner and Van Hell examined individual differences in LAN/N400-P600 effects and followed a data-analysis approach based on a visual inspection of Regions of Interest that included a-priori selected electrodes. Of note, the size of our sample does not allow investigating individual differences as in Tanner and Van Hell’s study, an issue that deserves further examination in future research.