Silva-Pereyra, J. F. . 1 , Prieto-Corona, B. 1 , Reynoso, V. 1 , Gutierrez-Sigut, E. 2 & Carreiras, M. 3, 4, 5
1 Proyecto de Neurociencias, FES Iztacala UNAM, México
2 University of California, Davies, USA
3 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, (BCBL), Donostia, Spain
4 IKERBASQUE. Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
5 Departamento de Filología Vasca, Universidad del País Vasco (UPV-EHU), Spain
Demonstrative pronouns refer to things that have been mentioned previously in the text and thus mentally represented in a discourse model. It has been shown that different components of event related potentials (ERP) are sensitive to pronominal reference resolution processes depending on the type of information considered during the bonding process. Some findings have suggested independence of syntactic and semantic information (N400/P600 taking semantic information first) or the interaction between them (only P600). This paper investigates whether demonstratives follow similar mechanisms to those involved in the comprehension of personal pronouns. Thirty young Spanish speakers were presented two clause Spanish sentences in three different experimental conditions: “La renuncia fue aceptada pero esto no molestó al gerente” ([The resignation was accepted]i but thisi did not surprise the manager); “La renuncia fue aceptada pero ésta no molestó al gerente” ([The resignation]i was accepted but iti did not surprise the manager); “La renuncia fue aceptada pero éste no molestó al gerente” ([The resignation was accepted]i but itj did not surprise the manager). Different ERP patterns were found for different pronouns. The ERPs to ESTO (refers to the whole first clause) with respect to ESTA (refers only to the subject of the first clause) was an anterior negativity peaking around 400 ms. This negativity could reflect a high working memory load in a first automatic state during bonding process (no N400 was observed). Because gender is incompatible with the only possible antecedent for ESTE, the sentences becomes ungrammatical. This condition elicits a larger P600 than the grammatical condition. Results are discussed in terms of the current theories of anaphoric processing.