Santesteban, M. , Zawiszewski, A. , Erdocia, K. & Laka, I.
UPV-EHU University of the Basque Country
Number attraction phenomenon in subject-verb agreement relations has been widely studied in language production and comprehension (e.g., Vigliocco, & Hartsuiker, 2002). However, only two studies have explored the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these effects, and they have reported N400 and P600 components associated to the number attraction effects in subject-verb agreement (Kaan, 2002; Severens & Hartsuiker, 2008). Here we explored the electrophysiological responses of number attraction effects on object-clitic pronouns in Spanish.
In a grammaticality judgment task, 46 Spanish native speakers were presented (word-by-word) with sentences containing a singular object-NP with a local noun that matched or mismatched in number with the head noun. Sentences were either grammatical or ungrammatical, depending of whether they contained an object-clitic pronoun that agreed or disagreed in number with the preceding object-NP (e.g., La pastora dijo que la casa de la(s) montaña(s) la/*las visitó en invierno [The shepherdess said that the house in the mountain(s), she visited it/*them in winter]).
Number attraction effects were revealed at the critical word position (la vs. *las): different ERP patterns related to grammaticality effects for number match (a fronto-central N400 followed by a P600) and mismatch (only a P600) conditions. The absence of N400 components in number mismatch conditions indicates that number attraction effects have a deep impact on early (considered automatic) stages of agreement computation, whereas later comprehension processes seem to remain unaffected.