Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Psychophysiology. 2021 Mar;58(3):e13737. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13737. Epub 2020 Dec 2.
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- and P600-dominant effects for both gender categories. However, results showed that individuals' ERP response dominance (LAN/P600) systematically differed across the two genders: participants who showed a LAN-dominant response to masculine-noun violations were more likely to show a P600 effect in response to feminine-noun violations. Correlations with individual difference measures further revealed that responses to masculine-noun violations were modulated by performance on the AX-CPT, a measure of cognitive control, whereas responses to feminine-noun violations were modulated by lexical knowledge, as indexed by verbal fluency. Together, the results demonstrate that even when processing features of language that belong to the same "natural class," native speakers can exhibit patterns of brain activity attuned to distributional patterns of language use. The inherent variability in native speaker processing is, therefore, an important factor when explaining purported deviations from the "native norm" reported in other types of populations.
对西班牙语语法性别进行的研究表明，以西班牙语为母语的人会利用限定词中的性别线索来促进言语处理，并且对性别不匹配很敏感。然而，过去的研究并没有考虑到阳性和阴性性别之间已证实的分布不对称性，而是将单一性别的试验表现合并到单一分析中。我们使用事件相关电位来研究阳性和阴性语法性别是否会引起大脑反应的质的不同。四十名以西班牙语为母语的说话者阅读了形式正确或包含限定词-名词性别错误的句子。名词的一半是阳性的，另一半是阴性的。与先前的研究一致，大脑反应在 LAN 和 P600 主导效应之间沿着连续体变化，对于这两个性别类别都是如此。然而，结果表明，个体的 ERP 反应优势（LAN/P600）系统地在两种性别之间存在差异：对阳性名词错误表现出 LAN 主导反应的参与者更有可能对阴性名词错误表现出 P600 效应。与个体差异测量的相关性进一步表明，对阳性名词错误的反应受到 AX-CPT（认知控制的一种衡量标准）的表现的调节，而对阴性名词错误的反应则受到词汇知识的调节，如言语流畅性所显示的那样。总之，这些结果表明，即使在处理属于同一“自然类别”的语言特征时，以西班牙语为母语的人也可以表现出与语言使用分布模式相协调的大脑活动模式。因此，在解释其他类型人群中报告的所谓偏离“母语规范”的情况时，母语者处理的固有可变性是一个重要因素。
