Bartlett, L. 1 , González-Vilbazo, K. 1 & Morgan-Short, K. 1, 2
1 Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago. Chicago, USA
2 Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago. Chicago, USA
Morphosyntactic agreement plays a significant role in language comprehension, particularly in languages such as Spanish, which has a rich inflectional structure. How is morphosyntax processed? How important is an agreeing element’s position in the syntactic structure? The analysis of morphosyntactic gender processing by native speakers (NS) as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs) has provided insight into these questions. The primary finding has been that gender agreement violations on determiners and adjectives generally elicit a LAN and/or P600 pattern (Barber and Carreiras, 2005; Davidson and Indefrey, 2009; Sabourin and Haverkort, 2003). However, agreement studies are often limited to having adjectives in one position, e.g., either pre- or postnominal; further, there can be confounds between form and position, e.g., prenominal determiners and postnominal adjectives. In order to gauge the contribution of syntax to morphosyntactic processing, it is important to observe the effects of agreement on one word category in different syntactic positions. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating gender agreement processing on both pre- and postnominal adjectives, as well as on determiners, in Spanish.
Participants, who were NS of Mexican Spanish, were asked to judge the acceptability of three-word phrases in Spanish involving determiner-adjective-noun order (prenominal – la simpática vaca ‘the nice cow’) and determiner-noun-adjective order (postnominal – la vaca simpática ‘the cow nice’). Gender agreement violations were made either prenominally – on determiners or prenominal adjectives – or postnominally – on postnominal adjectives. Preliminary analyses of the ERP results indicate processing differences between the two syntactic positions, regardless of whether agreement was between nouns and adjectives or between nouns and determiners. Prenominal modifiers lead to an N400 for gender agreement violations, whereas postnominal modifiers show an N400/P600. These findings imply that gender agreement processing may be dependent upon the syntactic configuration of the phrase, regardless of word category.