Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

The influence of semantic category membership on syntactic decisions: a study using event-related brain potentials.

Schiller NO, Schuhmann T, Neyndorff AC, Jansma BM

Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. n.schiller@psychology.unimaas.nl

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the influence of semantic category membership on syntactic decision-making. Native speakers of German viewed a series of words that were semantically marked or unmarked for gender and made go/no-go decisions about the grammatical gender of those words. The electrophysiological results indicated that participants could make a gender decision earlier when words were semantically gender-marked than when they were semantically gender-unmarked. Our data provide evidence for the influence of semantic category membership on the decision of the syntactic gender of a visually presented German noun. More specifically, our results support models of language comprehension in which semantic information processing of words is initiated prior to syntactic information processing is finalized.

Published 3 April 2006 in Brain Res, 1082(1): 153-64.
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