TY - JOUR AU - Berkum, J.J.A. van AU - Brown, C.M. AU - Hagoort, P. PY - 1999 UR - https://hdl.handle.net/2066/141508 AB - We review the implications of recent ERP evidence for when and how grammatical gender agreement constrains sentence parsing. In some theories of parsing, gender is assumed to immediately and categorically block gender-incongruent phrase structure alternatives from being pursued. In other theories, the parser initially ignores gender altogether. The ERP evidence we discuss suggests an intermediate position, in which grammatical gender does not immediately block gender-incongruent phrase structures from being considered, but is used to dispose of them shortly thereafter. TI - When does gender constrain parsing? Evidence from ERPs EP - 571 SN - 0090-6905 IS - iss. 5 SP - 555 JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research VL - vol. 28 DO - https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023224628266 ER - TY - JOUR AU - Berkum, J.J.A. van AU - Brown, C.M. AU - Hagoort, P. PY - 1999 UR - https://hdl.handle.net/2066/141498 AB - An event-related brain potentials experiment was carried out to examine the interplay of referential and structural factors during sentence processing in discourse. Subjects read (Dutch) sentences beginning like “David told the girl that … ” in short story contexts that had introduced either one or two referents for a critical singular noun phrase (“the girl”). The waveforms showed that within 280 ms after onset of the critical noun the reader had already determined whether the noun phrase had a unique referent in earlier discourse. Furthermore, this referential information was immediately used in parsing the rest of the sentence, which was briefly ambiguous between a complement clause (“ … that there would be some visitors”) and a relative clause (“ … that had been on the phone to hang up”). A consistent pattern of P600/SPS effects elicited by various subsequent disambiguations revealed that a two-referent discourse context had led the parser to initially pursue the relative-clause alternative to a larger extent than a one-referent context. Together, the results suggest that during the processing of sentences in discourse, structural and referential sources of information interact on a word-by-word basis. TI - Early referential context effects in sentence processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials EP - 182 SN - 0749-596X IS - iss. 2 SP - 147 JF - Journal of Memory and Language VL - vol. 41 DO - https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1999.2641 ER - TY - JOUR AU - Berkum, J.J.A. van AU - Brown, C.M. AU - Hagoort, P. PY - 1999 UR - https://hdl.handle.net/2066/141506 AB - In two ERP experiments we investigated how and when the language comprehension system relates an incoming word to semantic representations of an unfolding local sentence and a wider discourse. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with short stories. The last sentence of these stories occasionally contained a critical word that, although acceptable in the local sentence context, was semantically anomalous with respect to the wider discourse (e.g., Jane told the brother that he was exceptionally slow in a discourse context where he had in fact been very quick). Relative to coherent control words (e.g., quick), these discourse-dependent semantic anomalies elicited a large N400 effect that began at about 200 to 250 msec after word onset. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented without their original story context. Although t he words t hat had previously b een anomalous in discourse still elicited a slightly larger average N400 than the coherent words, the resulting N400 effect was much reduced, showing that the large effect observed in stories depended on the wider discourse. In the same experiment, single sentences that contained a clear local semantic anomaly elicited a standard sentence-dependent N400 effect (e.g., Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). The N400 effects elicited in discourse and in single sentences had the same time course, overall morphology, and scalp distribution. We argue that these ªndings are most compatible with models of language processing in which there is no fundamental distinction between the integration of a word in its local (sentence-level) and its global (discourse-level) semantic context. TI - Semantic integration in sentences and discourse: Evidence from the N400 EP - 671 SN - 0898-929X IS - iss. 6 SP - 657 JF - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience VL - vol. 11 DO - https://doi.org/10.1162/089892999563724 ER -