Poster D42, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Syntactic Priming in Brazilian Portuguese Sentence Comprehension: An EEG Study
Mailce B. Mota1,2, Daniela Brito de Jesus1, Ali Mazaheri3, Katrien Segaert3;1Federal University of Santa Catarina, 2CNPq, 3University of Birmingham
In online sentence comprehension, different types of constraints are very quickly taken into account during reading/ listening. How these constraints are implemented in the architecture of sentence processing is an active area of inquiry. A key aspect in this debate concerns how syntactic knowledge is organized in memory and how comprehenders make use of this knowledge to build syntactic structures in different languages. Syntactic (or structural) priming can provide evidence regarding the access to this knowledge. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the nature of priming effects in the comprehension of complex syntactic structures in Brazilian Portuguese, by assessing electrophysiological effects of structural repetition (passive voice), using the syntactic priming paradigm during a reading task. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from 60 scalp sites as 26 adult native speakers of Portuguese (N = 26; 14 women; mean age = 30,5 years; SD = 6,9) read active and passive sentences. We contrasted two conditions in which prime was presented in the passive voice (primed condition) and in the active voice (unprimed condition). Targets were in the passive voice for both conditions and there was no lexical (verb) repetition in the past participle in any of the conditions. The order of presentation of the conditions was alternated across participants: the primed>unprimed condition was presented first to half of the participants and the unprimed>primed condition was presented first to the other half. Eighty sentence sets were constructed per condition, each set containing one prime and one target sentence followed by one to three filler sentences. To encourage participants to read the sentences attentively, one comprehension question was inserted every 20 sentences. ERP data were analyzed with repeated measures ANOVA on the mean amplitude of the main verbs in the targets in five epochs to verify if ERP effects on scalp topographies and visual inspection were statistically significant. Separate ANOVAs were conducted for the targets on both conditions for both the whole head at the critical word in the past participle, as well as five regions of interest (ROI) in the scalp. Post hoc contrasts were formulated to include Order of condition’s presentation. We found that ERPs to verbs in the past participle (critical word) were associated with an N400 reduction in the primed condition. No P600 effect was found for Condition. However, significant effects were found for the N100 in the central-posterior region and for the P600 over posterior sites, indicating a main effect of Order of presentation and an interaction of Condition X Order for half of participants, respectively. The N400 effect could be related to the past participle, which seemed to serve as more powerful primes for their corresponding target forms than the simple past.
Themes: Syntax, Reading
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)