Pérez Muñoz, A. I. , Macizo, P. , Paolieri, D. & Bajo, M. T.
Experimental Psychology and Behavioral Physiology. University of Granada. Granada. Spain
To evaluate the processing of semantic and grammatical anomalies, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read Spanish sentences and decided whether they were anomalous or correct. ERPs were time-locked to critical words (adjectives). The adjectives were plausible in the context of the sentence (e.g., La vecina estaba muy ilusionada con su hijo -The neighbor was very excited with her son-) or they disagreed in number (e.g., ilusionadas), grammatical gender (ilusionado), or they were semantically anomalous relative to a noun previously read in the sentence (e.g., preferida -favourite-). Compared with plausible sentences, semantically incongruent sentences modulated ERPs in the 350-450 ms time-window, while grammatically incongruent sentences (number and gender disagreement) modulated ERPs in the 550-650 ms time-window. These results agree with the processing competition account in which the distinction between semantic and structural processing is evidenced with electrophysiological measures (Kos, Vosse, van den Brink, & Hagoort, 2010).