Offline and online measures of Unagreement in Spanish and Italian
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
Spanish
Research Area
Syntax
Location
MBSC Omaha Room 304
Start Date
17-10-2024 2:30 PM
End Date
17-10-2024 3:00 PM
Abstract
In Spanish, Unagreement sentences such as “Los lingüistas leemos mucho” (We linguists read a lot) may carry a 3rd p.pl. subject with 1p.pl. verb agreement. It is said that this structure is accepted in Spanish and Catalan but not in Italian or Portuguese. We first carry out a survey with native Italian speakers (n=154) and native Spanish speakers (n=114) to establish an objective measure that in Spanish Unagreement sentences are as acceptable as Standard Agreement sentences, while in Italian Unagreement sentences are as unacceptable as Agreement Clash sentences, which our study confirmed. If the apparently similar, but underlying different, syntactic structure of Spanish allows this type of agreement, what is its nature? Much work has been dedicated to this question (Bosque and Moreno 1984, Hurtado 1985, Rivero 2007, Villa-García 2010, Ackema and Neeleman 2013, Höhn 2016, inter alia). One approach (Ordoñez & Treviño 1999) claims that the verb agreement in Spanish, in general, is an incorporated pronominal subject, which co-refers with the “overt subject”. This hypothesis is supported by evidence using event-related potentials through reading stimuli which showed an N400 signal in Spanish Unagreement sentences, consistent with the anaphoric semantic anomaly that might arise from mismatching person features (Mancini et al. 2011). We carried out an ERP study using auditory stimuli to determine 1) whether the N400 finding can be replicated and 2) whether reaction time data gathered during the ERP experiment can tell us anything novel about how Unagreement sentences are processed. Our ERP data of 120 Spanish sentences (the same of our acceptability judgment survey) of 19 Spanish-speaking neurotypical adults (female=16, mean age=21.4), shows 1) no evidence of N400 semantic anomaly for Unagreement compared to Standard Agreement sentences 2) no differences in reaction times between Unagreement and Standard Agreement sentences and 3) although initially the brain's response to unagreement sentences closely resembles the response to Agreement Clash sentences, after 300ms of the presentation of the verb, it differs significantly from it and more closely resembles the brain's response to sentences that are typical of Standard Agreement.
Offline and online measures of Unagreement in Spanish and Italian
MBSC Omaha Room 304
In Spanish, Unagreement sentences such as “Los lingüistas leemos mucho” (We linguists read a lot) may carry a 3rd p.pl. subject with 1p.pl. verb agreement. It is said that this structure is accepted in Spanish and Catalan but not in Italian or Portuguese. We first carry out a survey with native Italian speakers (n=154) and native Spanish speakers (n=114) to establish an objective measure that in Spanish Unagreement sentences are as acceptable as Standard Agreement sentences, while in Italian Unagreement sentences are as unacceptable as Agreement Clash sentences, which our study confirmed. If the apparently similar, but underlying different, syntactic structure of Spanish allows this type of agreement, what is its nature? Much work has been dedicated to this question (Bosque and Moreno 1984, Hurtado 1985, Rivero 2007, Villa-García 2010, Ackema and Neeleman 2013, Höhn 2016, inter alia). One approach (Ordoñez & Treviño 1999) claims that the verb agreement in Spanish, in general, is an incorporated pronominal subject, which co-refers with the “overt subject”. This hypothesis is supported by evidence using event-related potentials through reading stimuli which showed an N400 signal in Spanish Unagreement sentences, consistent with the anaphoric semantic anomaly that might arise from mismatching person features (Mancini et al. 2011). We carried out an ERP study using auditory stimuli to determine 1) whether the N400 finding can be replicated and 2) whether reaction time data gathered during the ERP experiment can tell us anything novel about how Unagreement sentences are processed. Our ERP data of 120 Spanish sentences (the same of our acceptability judgment survey) of 19 Spanish-speaking neurotypical adults (female=16, mean age=21.4), shows 1) no evidence of N400 semantic anomaly for Unagreement compared to Standard Agreement sentences 2) no differences in reaction times between Unagreement and Standard Agreement sentences and 3) although initially the brain's response to unagreement sentences closely resembles the response to Agreement Clash sentences, after 300ms of the presentation of the verb, it differs significantly from it and more closely resembles the brain's response to sentences that are typical of Standard Agreement.