Judith McLaughlin

Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while 14 males and 14 females read sentences containing a reflexive pronoun that referred to a definitionally or stereotypically male or female antecedent noun. Pronouns that disagreed with the gender definition or gender stereotype of the antecedent elicited a large-amplitude positive wave. Violations of gender definitions elicited a larger positive wave than did violations of gender stereotypes. Furthermore, the positive wave elicited by stereotype violations persisted even when subjects judged these sentences to be acceptable. Finally, female subjects exhibited larger positivities than did male subjects, regardless of whether the gender mismatch involved a definitional or stereotypical antecedent. These results are taken to indicate that ERPs are sensitive to violations of gender-based occupational stereotypes and that the ERP response to stereotype violations is similar to the P600 effect elicited by a variety of syntactic anomalies.

Event-related brain potentials and human language

The human capacity to produce and comprehend language is one of the most distinctive characteristics of our species. However, understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of human language has proved difficult, in part because these processes are rapid, complex and (for the most part) inaccessible to conscious reflection. Methodologies are needed that provide continuous measurement during language processing and that do not rely on a conscious response. One such method involves the recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited during language comprehension or production. ERPs are continuous, multidimensional records of the electrical activity that occurs in the brain during the process of interest. We review recent work demonstrating that ERPs are quite sensitive to (at least some of) the psychological and neural events underlying human language. Indeed, researchers have used ERPs to investigate the separability of syntactic and semantic processes, the on-line analysis of sentence constituent structure and the lexical processing capacities of language-disordered populations.

Individual differences reveal stages of L2 grammatical acquisition: ERP evidence ∗

Here we report findings from a cross-sectional study of morphosyntactic processing in native German speakers and native English speakers enrolled in college-level German courses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants read sentences that were either well-formed or violated German subject–verb agreement. Results showed that grammatical violations elicited large P600 effects in the native Germans and learners enrolled in third-year courses. Grand mean waveforms for learners enrolled in first-year courses showed a biphasic N400–P600 response. However, subsequent correlation analyses revealed that most individuals showed either an N400 or a P600, but not both, and that brain response type was associated with behavioral measures of grammatical sensitivity. These results support models of second language acquisition which implicate qualitative changes in the neural substrates of second language grammar processing associated with learning. Importantly, we show that new insights into L2 learning result when the cross-subject variability is treated as a source of evidence rather than a source of noise.

Words in the brain: lexical determinants of word-induced brain activity

Abstract Many studies have shown that open- and closed-class words elicit different patterns of brain activity, as manifested in the scalp-recorded event-related potential (ERP). One hypothesis is that these ERP differences reflect the different linguistic functions of the two vocabularies. We tested this hypothesis against the possibility that the word-class effects are attributable to quantitative differences in word length. We recorded ERPs from 13 scalp sites while participants read a short essay. Some participants made sentence-acceptability judgments at the end of each sentence, whereas others read for comprehension without an additional task. ERPs were averaged as a function of word class (open versus closed), grammatical category (articles, nouns, verbs, etc.), and word length. Although the two word classes did elicit distinct ERPs, all of these differences were highly correlated with word length. We conclude that ERP differences between open- and closed-class words are primarily due to quantitative differences in word length rather than to qualitative differences in linguistic function.

Sentences in the brain

Eye tracking paradigms in both written and spoken modalities are the state of the art for online behavioral investigations of language comprehension. But it is almost a misnomer to refer to the two types of paradigms by the same ―eye-tracking‖ label, because they are quite different. Reading paradigms gauge local processing difficulty by measuring the participant’s gaze on the very material that he or she is trying to comprehend. The critical sentence regions are determined spatially, and gaze is measured in terms of the time spent looking within a region of interest, the likelihood of a regressive eye movement out of the region, and so forth. In contrast, listening paradigms gauge how rapidly successful comprehension occurs by measuring how quickly people look, or how likely people are to look, at objects referenced by the linguistic material.