Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction

This experiment explored the effect of semantic expectancy on the processin g of grammatical gender. and tice versa, in German using event-related-pote ntials (ERPs). Subjects were presented with correct sentences and sentences containing an article-noun gender agreement violation. The doze probabilit y of the nouns was either high or low. ERPs were measured on the nouns. The low-cloze nouns evoked a larger N400 than the high-cloze nouns. Gender vio lations elicited a left-anterior negativity (LAN, 300-600 msec) for ail nou ns. An additional P600 component was found only in high-cloze nouns. The N4 00 was independent of the gender mismatch variable; the LAN was independent of the semantic variable, whereas an interaction of the two variables was found in the P600. This finding indicates that syntactic and semantic proce sses are autonomous during an early processing stage, whereas these informa tion types interact during a later processing phase.