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The influence of semantic and phonological factors on syntactic decisions: An event‐related brain potential study
Author(s) -
Schiller Niels O.,
Münte Thomas F.,
Horemans Iemke,
Jansma Bernadette M.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/1469-8986.00105
Subject(s) - psychology , comprehension , grammatical gender , german , task (project management) , linguistics , language production , event (particle physics) , cognitive psychology , phonology , semantics (computer science) , event related potential , cognition , computer science , noun , neuroscience , economics , programming language , philosophy , physics , management , quantum mechanics
During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.