Agreement and illusion of disagreement: An ERP study on Basque

Published online 26 September 2018Agreement is a syntactic relation involving a controller (e.g., a noun) and a target with matching inflectional morphology (e.g., a verb). Across languages, electrophysiological studies consistently report that the presence of a mismatch yields late positive effects (P600), often preceded by early negativities. The current study focuses on person agreement in Basque to investigate whether online processing routines are modulated by the relative semantic prominence of nominal and verbal person features. In an event-related potentials experiment in Basque, we manipulated the semantic markedness of nominal and verbal person features, creating 1st (marked) and 3rd (unmarked) person correct and incorrect sentences [Japoniarrok1pl euskara ikasi dugu1pl/*dute3pl gustora (We Japanese have1pl/*3pl learn Basque with pleasure); Japoniarrek3pl euskara ikasi dute3pl/*dugu1pl gustora (The Japanese have3pl/*1pl learnt Basque with pleasure)]. Both mismatches elicited an N400 effect, but only marked 1st person mismatches (Japoniarrok1pl … *dute3.pl) generated a P600, suggesting that (i) mismatches with unmarked 3rd person subjects (Japoniarrek3.pl … *dugu1.pl) are not treated as outright violations; (ii) the emergence of late positive effects is sensitive to fine-grained discourse information. Overall, these results call for a revision in the analysis of agreement relations from a theoretical and a processing perspective.BCBL acknowledges funding from Ayuda Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, grant PSI2015e65694-P to Nicola Molinaro, grant PSI2015-65689-P to Jon Andoni Du~nabeitia and grant FFI2016-76432 to Simona Mancini), the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI), the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and the Basque Government (grant PI_2016_1_0014 to Nicola Molinaro) and by the framework LABEX CORTEX (ANR- 11-LABX-0042) of the Université de Lyon, within the program “Investissements d'Avenir” (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Simona Mancini also acknowledges funding from the Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia Fellowship program