Gender electrified: ERP evidence oil the syntactic nature of gender processing

The central issue of this study concerns the claim that the processing of g ender agreement in online sentence comprehension is a syntactic rather than a conceptual/semantic process. This claim was tested for the grammatical g ender agreement in Dutch between the definite article and the noun. Subject s read sentences in which the definite article and the noun had the same ge nder and sentences in which the gender agreement was violated. While subjec ts read these sentences, their electrophysiological activity was recorded v ia electrodes placed on the scalp. Earlier research has shown that semantic and syntactic processing events manifest themselves in different event-rel ated brain potential (ERP) effects. Semantic integration modulates the ampl itude of the so-called N400. The P600/SPS is an ERP effect that is more sen sitive to syntactic processes. The violation of grammatical gender agreemen t was found to result in a P600/SPS. For violations in sentence-final posit ion, an additional increase of the N400 amplitude was observed. This N400 e ffect is interpreted as resulting from the consequence of a syntactic viola tion for the sentence-final wrap-ap. The overall pattern of results support s the claim that the on-fine processing of gender agreement information is nor a content driven but a syntactic-form driven process.