Brain potentials reveal differential processing of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in native Spanish speakers.

ABSTRACT: Studies of Spanish grammatical gender have shown that native speakers exploit gender cues in determiners to facilitate speech processing and are sensitive to gender mismatches. However, past research has not considered attested distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine gender, collapsing performance on trials with one or the other gender into a single analysis. We use event-related potentials to investigate whether masculine and feminine grammatical gender elicit qualitatively different brain responses. Forty monolingual Spanish speakers read sentences that were well-formed or contained determiner-noun gender violations. Half of the nouns were masculine and the other half were feminine. Consistent with previous research, brain responses varied along a continuum between LAN-

SUBMITTER: Beatty-Martinez AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9036832 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature