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One can be some but some cannot be one: ERP correlates of numerosity incongruence are different for singular and plural.

  • Arcara G Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo IRCCS, Venezia, Italia. Electronic address: giorgio.arcara@gmail.com.
  • Franzon F Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Padova, Italia; Neuroscience Area, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italia.
  • Gastaldon S Department of Devolopmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italia.
  • Brotto S Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Padova, Italia.
  • Semenza C Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo IRCCS, Venezia, Italia; Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Padova, Italia; Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova, Padova, Italia.
  • Peressotti F Department of Devolopmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italia; Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova, Padova, Italia.
  • Zanini C Department of Neuroscience DNS, University of Padova, Padova, Italia; Romanisches Seminar, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
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  • 2018-12-15
Published in:
  • Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior. - 2019
ERP
LAN
Number morphology
Plural
Quantifiers
Singular
Adult
Brain
Brain Waves
Evoked Potentials
Female
Humans
Language
Male
Psycholinguistics
Reaction Time
Semantics
English Humans can communicate information on numerosity by means of number words (e.g., one hundred, a couple), but also through Number morphology (e.g., through the singular vs the plural forms of a noun). Agreement violations involving Number morphology (e.g., *one apples) are well known to elicit specific ERP components such as the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN); yet, the relationship between a morphological Number value (e.g., singular vs plural) and its referential numerosity has rarely been considered in the literature. Moreover, even if agreement violations have been proven to be very useful, they do not typically characterise everyday language usage, thus narrowing the scope of the results. In this study we investigated Number morphology from a different perspective, by focusing on the ERP correlates of congruence and incongruence between a depicted numerosity and noun phrases. To this aim we designed a picture-phrase matching paradigm in Italian. In each trial, a picture depicting one or four objects was followed by a grammatically well-formed phrase made up of a quantifier and a content noun inflected either in the singular or in the plural. When analysing ERP time-locked to the content noun, plural phrases after pictures presenting one object elicited a larger negativity, similar to a LAN effect. No significant congruence effect was found in the case of the phrases whose morphological Number value conveyed a numerosity of one. Our results suggest that: 1) incongruence elicits a LAN-like negativity independently from the grammaticality of the utterances and irrespectively of the P600 component; 2) the reference to a numerosity can be partially encoded in an incremental way when processing Number morphology; and, most importantly, 3) the processing of the morphological Number value of plural is different from that of singular as the former shows a narrower interpretability than the latter.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/22090
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