Discourse before gender: an event-related brain potential study on the interplay of semantic and syntactic information during spoken language understanding.

A study is presented on the effects of discourse-semantic and lexical-syntactic information during spoken sentence processing. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were registered while subjects listened to discourses that ended in a sentence with a temporary syntactic ambiguity. The prior discourse-semantic information biased toward one analysis of the temporary ambiguity, whereas the lexical-syntactic information allowed only for the alternative analysis. The ERP results show that discourse-semantic information can momentarily take precedence over syntactic information, even if this violates grammatical gender agreement rules.