ELAN reflecting animacy property manipulation: an ERP study with native speakers and late learners of English
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1
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
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2
University of London, United Kingdom
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3
University of Reading, United Kingdom
The current study used the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique to examine how and when animacy information (i.e. animate/inanimate object) is used when processing complex syntactic structures. One particular ERP component, the ELAN (Early Left Anterior Negativity elicited between 100 and 300 ms) is sensitive to grammatical category (Friederici, 2002), but also to animacy information (Fonteneau & van der Lely, 2008) and contextual expectancy (Lau, Stroud, Plesh & Phillips, 2006). Building up a syntactic structure presupposes knowledge of the combinatorial rules and grammatical constraints operating in the specifc language. However, this knowledge also needs to be used online in order to process the linguistic input in real-time. Previous studies using behavioural and ERP experiments has suggested that learning a language late directly affects syntactic processing (Hahne, 2001; Marinis, Roberts, Felser & Clahsen, 2005). This study compares the brain activity from adult native speakers of English (L1: N=20, 18-33 years old) with adult late learners of English (L2: L1=Greek, L2 acquired after 5 years old, N=20, 19-38 years old) when wh-object questions were processed. Participants heard sentences that were off-line rated as having an expected noun (Who did Jack race the boat with?) or non-expected noun (Who did Jack race the man with?) based on their animacy properties. Results from the off-line test (completion test) indicated that both groups have similar expectations in relation to the wh-word but also the argument structure of the verb. Neural activity for the English native speakers indicated that the noun in the non-expected condition (man) elicited a typical ELAN/P600 complex compared to the noun in the expected condition (boat). Moreover, the amplitude of the ELAN component was modulated by the different expectations. For the late learners of English, the ERPs from the noun in the non-expected condition (man) elicited a typical N400 compared to the noun in the expected condition (boat). This effect is recorded later (500-800 ms) compared to the ELAN (100-300 ms) from the L1 group, and also showed a different distribution on the scalp (posterior maximum). Firstly, these results demonstrate that the ELAN reflects not only grammatical category violation (Friederici, 2002), but also animacy property manipulation in complex structures (Fonteneau & van der Lely, 2008). Secondly, even if late learners of English (L2) have the specific knowledge about combinatorial rules and grammatical constraints of English, they do not activate appropriate neural networks to process this information on-line.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Fonteneau
E and
Marinis
T
(2008). ELAN reflecting animacy property manipulation: an ERP study with native speakers and late learners of English.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.246
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Received:
09 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Elisabeth Fonteneau, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, elisabeth.fonteneau@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk