On the Cross-Linguistic Validity of Electrophysiological Correlates of Morphosyntactic Processing: a Study of Case and Agreement Violations in Basque

Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373

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On the cross-linguistic validity of electrophysiological correlates of morphosyntactic processing: A study of case and agreement violations in Basque

Begoña Díaz a,*, Núria Sebastián-Gallés b, Kepa Erdocia c, Jutta L. Mueller a, Itziar Laka c a Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany b Brain and Cognition Unit, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Roc Boronat 138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain c Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Unibertsitateen Ibilbidea 5, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain article info abstract

Article history: The present study addresses the question of whether case and verb Received 30 July 2010 agreement are cross linguistically equivalent during sentence pro- Received in revised form 14 December 2010 cessing. This question is addressed by exploring the brain mecha- Accepted 14 December 2010 nisms involved in processing Basque, a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) head-ﬁnal language with ergative alignment, case morphology and Keywords: multiple verb agreement. Basque speakers’ ERPs were recorded Event-related brain potentials during an auditory grammatical judgment task. Participants were Basque Syntax presented with correct and incorrect sentences addressed to study Ergativity, case morphology ergative case and subject and object verb-agreement processing. Number verb agreement Incorrect sentences elicited, in all cases, a P600 component, an ERP Object agreement, P600 effect repeatedly reported in previous studies that explored syntactic violations similar to the present ones, although in nominative languages. The results of this study show comparable ERP responses to both subject and object agreement and indicate that speciﬁc features of agreement (number versus person) have distinct ERP correlates, at least for multiple verb agreement. In addition, the ERP signatures for the ergative case violation were comparable to the ones found by previous studies on nominative case. Overall, the present study shows that the repair and reanalysis processes involved in verb agreement and case violations are sustained by equivalent neural mechanisms across language types. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ49 341 99402480; fax: þ49 341 9940 104. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Díaz).

1. Introduction

Languages differ in their grammatical properties but are all represented and processed in the human brain. Despite recent advances in the neurocognition of language, we still do not know how to reconcile the vast diversity of human grammars with the shared neural bases in which they are grounded. Cross-linguistic research is the crucial source of insight in order to understand how to solve this puzzle. Event-related potentials (ERP) have shown great sensitivity in capturing the neural underpinnings of cross-linguistic variation (Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). However, the ERP studies carried out up to now are far from covering a signiﬁcant part of the spectrum of typological variation found in human languages. The present study aims at contributing to our understanding of the cross-linguistic validity of electrophysiological correlates for language processing; this aim is approached by exploring the brain mechanisms involved in processing a combination of linguistic properties that have received little attention in the literature, such as ergativity, case morphology, and multiple verb agreement, all found in a SOV head-ﬁnal language such as Basque.

1.1. Verb-agreement and case morphology

Verb-agreement is a grammatical phenomenon whereby verbal inﬂection matches in a number of features (most frequently person and number, less frequently gender) with a core argument of the verb (Spencer & Zwicky, 1998; Baker, 2008). Some languages, like Japanese, do not display this morphological phenomenon while others, such as Basque, or Spanish, do. The arguments the verb agrees with are subject to variation; for instance, in Spanish the verb agrees only with the subject (1a), but in Basque the verb agrees with both the subject and the object (1b).

(1a) Yo com-o las manzanas I eat-1st Det.pl apples I eat the apples (1b) Ni-k sagarr-ak jaten d-it-u-t I-erg apple-Det.pl eat 3rd-pl-have-1st I eat the apples

Subject-verb agreement processing has been investigated in many different languages (i.e. English: Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998; German: Münte, Matzke, & Johannes, 1997; Dutch: Hagoort & Brown, 2000; Finnish: Palolahti, Leino, Jokela, Kopra, & Paavilainen, 2005; Spanish: Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; Hindi: Nevins, Dillon, Malhotra, & Phillips, 2007; and, French: Frenck-Mestre, Osterhout, McLaughlin, & Foucart, 2008) and for different morphological features (i.e. person, number and gender: Nevins et al., 2007; Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007). Regardless of the language or feature under study, agreement violations are indexed by a centro-parietal positive deflection between 500 and 800 ms after the critical word; this ERP component has been named P600 (Münte et al., 1997; Coulson et al., 1998; Hagoort & Brown, 2000; Palolahti et al., 2005; Rossi, Gugler, Hahne, & Friederici, 2005; Nevins et al., 2007; Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; Frenck- Mestre et al., 2008). While subject-verb agreement is a fairly well studied phenomenon, so far only one study has explored the case of multiple (i.e. subject and object) verb agreement. Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) compared subject- and object-verb agreement relations by looking at multiple agreements in Basque. In an on-line reading task, violations of both subject and object agreement involving the person morpheme elicited a P600 preceded by a centro-posterior negativity peaking 400 ms after the incorrect verb form. This negativity was interpreted by Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) as an instance of the N400, an ERP component generally associated to semantic integration for semantic unexpected words (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980) and also to difficulties in thematic role assignment in languages with morphological case (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001). In addition, Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) also reported larger N400 responses for the subject-verb agreement violation than for the object-verb agreement, while the reverse pattern was true for the amplitude of the P600 component. The finding of an N400 for B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 359 verb-agreement violations constitutes a novel result, since previous studies on subject-verb agreement reported, if any, a left anterior negativity (LAN) component preceding the P600 (studies reporting a LAN-P600 pattern: Coulson et al., 1998; Hagoort & Brown, 2000; Palolahti et al., 2005; Rossi et al., 2005; Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; studies reporting only a P600: Münte et al., 1997; Hagoort & Brown, 2000; Nevins et al., 2007; Frenck-Mestre et al., 2008). Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) suggested that the novel finding of an N400 in response to verb-agreement violations in Basque resulted from the multiplicity of agreement in this language, which created difficulties in the thematic determination of the arguments. In addition to verb agreement, another frequently found argument-marking phenomenon among languages in the world is case morphology, that is, the overt marking of the grammatical function (e.g. subject, object, dative) of the core arguments of a sentence by means of a morpheme (Spencer & Zwicky, 1998). Morphological case marking is most often found in verb final languages, which also tend to allow free word order (e.g. German, Latin, Japanese, Basque). Processing the case markers correctly is necessary to determine the syntactic function and semantic role of the arguments in the sentence, particularly when word order is not a valid cue. For instance, the different meaning of the German sentences (2a) and (2b) can only be derived by the correct interpretation of the nominative (i.e. der) or accusative (i.e. den) case markers.

(2a) Der Fahrer sah den Fußgänger Det-nom driver saw Det-acc pedestrian The driver saw the pedestrian (2b) Den Fahrer sah der Fußgänger Det-acc driver saw Det-nom pedestrian The pedestrian saw the driver

Languages differ regarding the way in which they case-mark core arguments. There are two main argument-alignment types: the nominative/accusative type and the ergative/absolutive type. The most studied argument alignment type is the nominative-accusative, to which languages like German or Japanese belong (Comrie, 1987). In nominative languages, transitive (3a) and intransitive subjects (3b) are marked alike (nominative), and objects receive a different marking (accusative), as illustrated in (3) for German:

(3a) Der Junge liest ein Buch The boy reads a book (3b) Der Junge liest The boy reads

Previous ERP studies exploring the processing of case marking violations have considered almost exclusively nominative-accusative languages (in German: Friederici & Frisch, 2000; Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005; in Japanese: Mueller, Hahne, Fujii, & Friederici, 2005; Mueller, Hirotani & Friederici., 2007). In these studies, case marking violations were created either by presenting sentences in which two different NPs had the same case marker (double case violation) or by marking one NP with an incorrect case. In all cases, the results of these studies showed a P600 effect for the second, incorrectly case-marked NP. In addition, double case violations elicited an N400 effect when the thematic role of the arguments could not be assigned based on other prominence cues as animacy or deﬁniteness/speciﬁcity, among others (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001; for a comprehensive explanation on prominence scales in processing see Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2009). In contrast, the ergative argument alignment type, which is found in about a quarter of the world’s languages such as Hindi, Georgian, Inuit, or Basque, has received little attention in the neurocognitive studies of language processing. In ergative languages, intransitive subjects and objects are morphologically identical (unmarked) while transitive subjects are distinctively marked with ergative case (Dixon, 1994), as shown in (4) for Inuit (from Bobaljik, 1992) 360 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373

(4a) Jaani-up natsiq kapi-jaNa Jaani-erg seal stab-trans Jaani stabbed a seal (4b) inuk tiki-tuq person arrived the person arrived (4c) iliniaqtitsiji uqaq-tuq teacher spoke the teacher spoke

To the best of our knowledge, there is only one ERP study on the processing of ergative case violations: Choudhary, Schlesewsky, Roehm, and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (2009) analyzed the ERP correlates of incorrect ergative case markers in Hindi. Hindi is a split-ergative language: transitive subjects are marked with ergative case in aspectually perfective sentences (5a), but with nominative in imperfective sentences (5b) (from Mahajan, 1990).

(5a) Sitaa ne vah ghar kharidaathaa Sita-fem-erg that house-masc buy-PRF-masc be-PST Sita has bought that house (5b) Sitaa vah gharkhariddegii Sita-fem that house-masc buy-fut-fem Sita will buy that house

Choudhary et al. (2009) interchanged the subject case markers, i.e. ergative and nominative, across perfective and imperfective sentences to create grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The incorrectly marked sentences engendered an N400 response at verb position, followed by a P600 when the ergative case was misused as a consequence of the semantic import of the agentive meaning attached to the ergative case marker. The study of Choudhary et al. (2009) is relevant in that demon- strates an N400 modulation of interpretively relevant rule-based information. Still, the lack of a P600 effect in one comparison is difﬁcult to be explained under the light of current knowledge on sentence processing. Nevertheless, the fact that Choudhary et al. (2009) employed a different manipulation (aspect mismatch of the subject case) to previous studies on nominative languages (double case or verb argument violations) makes a comparison of the results between alignment types difﬁcult. Hence, to properly ascertain whether nominative and ergative alignment patterns yield equivalent effects in language processing, further cross-linguistic evidence from ergative languages is required.

1.2. The impact of word order on language processing

Although approximately 70% of natural languages exhibit a significant degree of word order freedom (Steele, 1978), languages vary with regards to their basic or canonical word order. This variation is found independently of the specific linguistic criteria used to characterize basic or canonical word order (Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil, & Comrie, 2008). Recent processing studies suggest that basic word order (SVO versus SOV) may have a deep impact on language processing. Langus and Nespor (2010) for instance, argue that SVO and SOV languages employ different neurocognitive substrata and involve distinct cognitive subsystems, and there is ample evidence from syntactic processing studies pointing toward distinct processing strategies as a function of the basic word order (Hawkins, 1994; Hawkins, 1999; Yamashita & Chang, 2001; Hawkins et al., 2002; Hawkins, 2004; Ueno & Polinsky, 2009). It has been argued that the origin of these processing differences may stem from the role played by the verb in sentence comprehension; indeed, interpretation and integration of displaced syntactic elements has been argued to take place at verb position (Pickering & Barry, 1991; Gibson & Hickok, 1993; Pickering, 1993); it has been claimed that the number and type of arguments of the sentence (NP or sentential, for example) is evaluated at verb position (Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993; Garnseya, Pearlmutterb, Myersa, & Lotocky, 1997), and that syntactic attachment happens when the B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 361 verb is processed (Pritchett, 1992). Thus, all other things equal, SOV word order should impose heavier processing demands on the cognitive system than SVO, given the increase on memory load until the sentence-final verb is reached. However, studies in word order processing in Basque report that SOV is the preferred and computationally less demanding word order in this language (Erdocia, Laka, Mestres-Misse, & Rodriguez-Fornells, 2009; Erdocia, Laka & Rodriguez-Fornells, in press). These findings can be accounted for if SOV languages employ processing strategies that rely more on case morphology, which allows for the early determination of the thematic role and grammatical function of each nominal argument, so that core grammatical information can be accessed before reaching the verb. It is thus plausible that SOV versus SVO language types favor distinct processing strategies regarding the preeminence of different grammatical phenomena such as case-marking, verb agreement or word order. This hypothesis gains plausibility when we consider Greenberg’s(1966) generalization that languages with basic SOV order typically have case morphology, while SVO languages tend not to (Comrie, 1987). Neurocognitive models of language processing also point to differences in the deployment of processing strategies and the use of different grammatical phenomena as cues across languages; for instance, The Extended Argument Dependency Model (Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006), claims that incremental argument interpretation across language types is best explained with reference to a cross-linguistically motivated ‘prominence scale’ containing information such as case marking and word order, among others, where different grammars yield different prominence scales. Research on the impact of language variation in processing strategies has so far mostly focused on the relatively higher impact of NP case-marking in SOV languages versus the relatively higher impact of the information encoded in the verb in SVO languages. In the present study, we study case and agreement processing in Basque, an ergative SOV language that encodes grammatically relevant information by means not only of case marking, but also by means of verb-morphology as it encodes agreement with more than one argument. This cluster of typological features provides a new testing ground for the study of the relative impact of case and verb agreement in language processing.

1.3. Some relevant properties of Basque grammar

Basque does not belong to any known language family (Trask, 1996); this isolate language displays a combination of grammatical traits that are rare among the world’s languages, and not found in neighboring Indo-European languages. It is a consistently head-ﬁnal, SOV language (De Rijk, 1969), which is shown by the fact that relative clauses and genitives are prenominal (6a, b), postpositions are used instead of prepositions (6b), determiners and case markers follow the noun (6a, b), and inﬂected auxiliaries follow the verb (6a). In addition, the morphology is agglutinative, that is, morphemes are stacked one after another at the end of the word/phrase.

(6a) Emakume-a-k e1 ikusi du-en gizon-a1 Woman-the-erg e1 seen has-rel man-the1 The man that the woman has seen (6b) Emakume-a-ren lagun-a Woman-the-gen friend-the The woman’s friend

Previously studied SOV languages, like Japanese or Korean, also have case marking but completely lack verb agreement, plausibly rendering the verb less central to process core arguments. Basque has case-marking on NPs and obligatory verb agreement with both subject and object (7a, b1); hence, it is likely that the verb plays a more relevant role in the computation of core argument relations when compared to other verb ﬁnal, case marking (but agreement-less) languages.

1 In Basque, dative arguments also agree with the verb. The present study does not evaluate this type of verb agreement. 362 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373

(7a) Zu-k ni ikusi na-u-zu You-erg me seen me-have-you You have seen me (7b) Ni-k zu-ri musu-a eman d-i-zu-t I-erg you-dat kiss-the given it-have-you-me I have given you a kiss

Basque is consistently ergative (8a,b), that is, intransitive subjects and objects are morphologically identical (unmarked) while transitive subjects are distinctively case-marked (Levin, 1983; Laka, 1993a):

(8a) Gizon-a etorri da Man-the arrived 3p-be The man arrived (8b) Emakume-a-k gizon-a ikusi du Woman-the-erg man-the seen 3p-have-3p The woman has seen the man

Hence, although Basque grammar shares some typological properties with languages like Japanese or Korean (Head-ﬁnal/SOV type and NP case-marking), it differs in crucial features (ergativity and subject/object verb-agreement), yielding an array of properties that make it particularly relevant for out understanding of the relative role played by various grammatical cues in language processing.

1.4. The present study

Given that Basque has both subject- and object-verb agreement, it allows us to compare different types of agreement relations in order to determine (i) whether verb agreement is cross-linguistically equivalent in sentence processing, and (ii) whether subject and object-agreement relations are neu- rocognitively equivalent. In addition, since Basque is an ergative language with case morphology on NPs, the present study also allows us to explore the validity of results on grammatical function processing obtained so far, by seeking to replicate them in a type of argument alignment that has barely received attention in the processing literature: the ergative type2 (Dixon, 1994). In our study, native Basque speakers participated in an ERP recording while performing a grammatical judgment task on auditory Basque sentences. Half of the sentences were grammatical while the other half of the sentences contained either a (i) subject-verb agreement violation, (ii) object-verb agreement violation or, (iii) double case ergative case violation (see Table 1). Both subject- and object-verb agreement violations presented a mismatch in number between a plural subject or object, respectively, and a corresponding singular agreement marker in the auxiliary verb (see Table 1). That is, the agreement violations were created by manipulating only the number feature, but keeping the person feature correct, in contrast to the person feature violations employed by Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009). Thus, in the present study, if an N400 is found in response to number subject- and object-verb agreement violations, the implication of the thematic hierarchy in the N400 argued for by Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) would be difficult to support. Alternatively, if no N400 is elicited for subject and object number-agreement violations, these results, together with the findings of Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009), would indicate that electrophysiological measures of language processing can be sensitive enough to detect feature-specific violations in agreement (e.g. number versus person). This issue has not been yet resolved, despite a few attempts in the literature (Nevins et al., 2007; Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007). Regarding the ergative case violation, the violation studied here involves two ergative case-marked NPs in one sentence, manipulation frequently used in previous studies on nominative/accusative

2 Basque has also been characterized as an active type or an extended-ergative type (Comrie, 1987; Laka, 2006a; Ortiz de Urbina, 1989). For the purposes of the present work, those types can be considered as subsets of the general ergative type, in that they all contrast with the alignment type found in nominative-accusative languages. B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 363

Table 1 Experimental stimulus examples. Bold words represent the critical word for each violation condition, from which onset epochs were established.

1. Grammatical Sentence (40 items) Mikel-en arreb-ek egunkari-a saski-a-n ekarri d-u-te kiosko-tik Mikel-[gen.] sister-the-[erg.pl.] newspaper-the-[abs.sg.] basket-the-in brought it-root-they kiosk-from ‘Mikel’s sisters have brought the newspaper in a basket from the kiosk’

2. Subject-Verb Agreement Violation (40 items) Mikel-en arreb-ek egunkari-a saski-a-n ekarri d-*u kiosko-tik Mikel-[gen.] sister-the-[erg.pl.] newspaper-the-[abs.sg.] basket-the-in brought it-root-*it kiosk-from

3. Ergative Case Violation (40 items) Mikel-en arreb-ek egunkari-*ek saski-a-n ekarri d-u-te kiosko-tik Mikel-[gen.] sister-the-[erg.pl.] newspaper-the-*[erg.pl.] basket-the-in brought it-root-they kiosk-from

4. Grammatical Object-Verb Agreement (40 items) Mikel-en arreb-ek egunkari-a-k saski-a-n ekarri dit-u-zte kiosko-tik Mikel-[gen.] sister-the-[erg.pl.] newspaper-the-[abs.pl.] basket-the-in brought them-root-they kiosk-from ‘Mikel’s sisters have brought the newspapers in a basket from the kiosk’

5. Object-Verb Agreement Violation (40 items) Mikel-en arreb-ek egunkari-a-k saski-a-n ekarri *d-u-te kiosko-tik Mikel-[gen.] sister-the-[erg.pl.] newspaper-the-[abs.pl.] basket -the-in brought *it-root-they kiosk-from languages (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005; Mueller et al., 2005; Mueller, Hirotani & Friederici., 2007). Double case violations elicited in these studies a biphasic N400-P600 pattern time-locked to the second nominative-marked NP. Given that Basque is verb final, the second ergative-marked NP could temporarily be parsed as an embedded subject (i.e. [SubjERG [SubjERG . V] V]). However, this interpretation must be finally discarded as the sentences unfold and no embedding is encountered. Previous studies with verb-final languages, regardless of whether the second NP could be temporarily considered grammatical as in Japanese (Mueller et al., 2005, 2007), or not, as in German (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005) consistently report a P600 effect time-locked to the second nominative NP. If our case violation elicits only an N400, as previously reported in Hindi (Choudhary et al., 2009), we could conclude that ergative alignment engages different neural computations from those involved in nominative alignment. Alternatively, a P600 effect in response to the present case violation would reflect common neural underpinnings sustaining both alignment types.

2. Methods

2.1. Participants

A group of twenty-four Basque native speakers (16 female, mean age: 23.5 years, range 18–38 years) participated in the present study. All participants were right-handed as assessed by The Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971). Participants were recruited at the University of the Basque Country and were paid for their participation in the study. Participants were also highly proficient in Spanish and had moderate knowledge of other Indo-European languages (specifically, English and French). All participants signed the corresponding written informed consent.

2.2. Materials

Examples of the two sets of grammatical sentences and the three sets of ungrammatical sentences are presented in Table 1. Forty grammatical Basque sentences were created. From each of the grammatical sentences, the rest of the conditions were derived. The subject-verb agreement violation sentences had plural subjects and singular agreement on the verb. Case violations were created by marking two arguments with ergative case. A second grammatical condition was used for comparisons with the object-verb agreement violations. The sentences from this second set of grammatical sentences were equal to the first set of grammatical sentences except in the number specification of the 364 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 object and the verbal agreement marker. In this case, grammatical sentences contained a plural object that agreed with the verb. The ungrammatical sentences for the object-verb violation condition were created by replacing the grammatical auxiliary verb from the second set of grammatical sentences by a singular object-verb agreement auxiliary. In addition, 80 fillers (grammatical sentences) were presented. In order to avoid wrap-up effects, the critical words were never in final-sentence position. All sentences were spoken by a female Basque native speaker in a soundproof booth. Sentences were digitally recorded with 16-bits. No differences in sentences length or mean amplitude were present across conditions (Length: F(6,234) < 1; Amplitude: F(6,234) ¼ 1.36, p > 0.05). In addition, the lemma frequencies per million of the critical words were calculated (Landa Ijurko, 2009). In the case of the subject-verb agreement condition, for all the grammatical sentences the critical wordwastheauxiliaryverbdute and, for the ungrammatical ones it was du. In the case of the object-verb agreement, the critical word for all the sentences was the auxiliary dituzte for the grammatical sentences and the auxiliary dute for the ungrammatical ones. The lexical frequencies of the auxiliaries dute, du,and dituzte were 89,509,177,861, and 27,264 respectively. For the ergative case condition, the critical word was always the third word of the sentences. As grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in that condition were identical, except for the case morpheme attached to the second NP, grammatical and ungrammatical sentences had the same critical words. Therefore, the lexical frequency of the critical words did not vary between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The length of the critical words was also measured (Perea et al., 2006). The critical words of the grammatical sentences (mean: 6.85 letters) were always one letter shorter those in the ungrammatical sentences (mean: 7.85 letters) because of the one letter difference between the case morphemes changed between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.

2.3. Procedure

ERP measurements took place in a soundproof booth at ELEBILAB, the Psycholinguistics Laboratory at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The experiment was run using the Expe6 experimental software (Pallier, Dupoux, & Jeannin, 1997; http://www.lscp.net/expe). Instructions for participants were given in written form. Participants sat in a comfortable chair in front of a computer monitor. They performed a delayed grammatical judgment task after listening to each of the Basque sentences that were either correct or incorrect. Participants were given written instructions. Partici- pants were instructed to push one button with one hand when listening to correct sentences and to push another button with the other hand, when the sentence presented was incorrect. The response hand was balanced across participants. In addition, instructions stressed the relevance of avoiding blinks and body and eye movements starting from the apparition of an asterisk on the computer screen until a resting message was displayed. The experiment started with eight practice trials where feed- back was provided. After the training phase, the 320 trials were presented in random order with the constraint that no more than three consecutive trials were presented from the same condition. Each trial started with the presentation of a ﬁxation point, an asterisk, for 500 ms. Then, an auditory sentence was played binaurally through headphones (Sennheiser HD 435 Manhattan). After the offset of the auditory stimulus, the asterisk remained on the screen for 1500 ms. Following that time, the asterisk was replaced by a response message, allowing participants to respond. No time limit was imposed on participants’ responses. The following trial started 1500 ms after participants’ response. During this inter-trial interval, a rest message appeared on the screen informing participants that they could freely blink.

2.4. Electrophysiological recording

The EEG signal was recorded using a BrainAmp ampliﬁer and the Brain Vision recorder software (Brain Products GmbH, Munich, Germany). The ERPs were recorded from the scalp using tin electrodes mounted in an electrocap (Electro-Cap International) and located at 58 standard positions (Fp1, Fp2, F4A, F5, F1, F2, F6, C5A, C1A, C2A, C6A, C5, C1, C2, T4, Fpz, F3A, F7, F3, Fz, F4, F8, C3A, CZA, C4A, T3, C3, Cz, C4, C6, T3L, C3P, PZA, C4P, T4L, P5, P1, P2, P6, CB1, P1P, P2P, CB2, Oz, TCP1, C1P, C2P, TCP2, T5, P3, Pz, P4, T6, P3P, PZP, P4P, O1, O2). Eye movements were measured with electrodes attached to the infra-orbital ridge and on the outer canthus of the right eye. The EEG recording was referenced on-line to the right B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 365 mastoid and rereferenced off-line to linked mastoids. Electrode impedances were kept below 5 kOhm. The electrophysiological signals were ﬁltered on-line with a bandpass of 0.01–50 Hz and digitized at a rate of 500 Hz.

2.5. Data analysis

2.5.1. Behavioral data Percentage of hit rates for each condition were submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA with the factor “Condition” (grammatical, case, subject, grammatical object and object) as a within subjects factor.

2.5.2. Electrophysiological data The EEG was analyzed using EEprobe (ANT, The Netherlands). Epochs were time-locked to the beginning of the ungrammatical verb in both the subject and object-agreement conditions and to the second ergative marker in the second noun in the ergative case condition. Epochs included, in all cases, a pre-stimulus baseline of 100 ms and were 1500 ms long. Only correctly answered trials were included in the ERP analysis. Furthermore, epochs with EEG or EOG exceeding a deviation of 30 mV from the standard amplitude of a 200 ms moving window were automatically rejected off-line. In addition, the data were visually inspected for artifacts. Globally, 13.46% of the trials were rejected (subject-agreement condition: grammatical 14.79% and ungrammatical 11.45%; object-agreement condition: grammatical 11.87% and ungrammatical 13.12%; ergative case condition: grammatical 13.33% and ungrammatical: 16.25%). ERPs were averaged off-line separately for each participant and condition. For the determination of the onsets and durations of the ERP effects, the ERP amplitude for the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were compared for each condition separately across the whole epoch (from 0 to 1500 ms) by means of t tests on 30 successive time windows of 50 ms at each electrode. As in previous studies, ERP effects were considered reliable when at least two consecutive 50 ms intervals reached significant levels (p < 0.05) in order to avoid false positives caused by the large number of statistical comparisons (Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997; Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000; Hahne & Friederici, 2001). Fig. 1 displays the time windows where the comparison of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences was significant. Subsequent ANOVAS were performed on the time windows were reliable ERP effects were showed by the analysis on the 50 ms intervals (subject-agreement condition: 400-1000; object-agreement condition: 200-300, 300-1150; ergative case condition: 400-1250). For evaluating the scalp distribution of the ERP effects, electrodes were grouped in four regions of interest (ROIs): left anterior (FP1, F3A, F1, F3, F5, C1A, C3A, C5A), right anterior (FP2, F4A, F2, F4, F6, C2A, C4A, C6A), left posterior (C1P, C3P, TCP1, P1, P3, P5, P1P, O1) and right posterior (C2P, C4P, TCP2, P2, P4, P6, P2P, O2). The mean voltages for each violation type were separately submitted to repeated measures ANOVAs with the factors “Grammati- cality” (grammatical and ungrammatical), “Region” (anterior and posterior) and “Hemisphere” (left and right) as within subject factors. Whenever the factor “Grammaticality” interacted significantly with any or both of the other factors (“Region” and/or “Hemisphere”), separate ANOVAs were performed to check for simple main effects of the factor Grammaticality for the particular scalp areas. In addition, following Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009), the significant effects found for the subject and object-agreement conditions were compared by means of a repeated measures ANOVA with the factors “Grammaticality” (grammatical and ungrammatical), “Region” (anterior and posterior), “Hemisphere” and the additional factor “Agreement” (subject and object-agreement). Significance levels of the F-ratios were adjusted with the Greenhouse–Geisser correction for effects with more than 1 degree of freedom in the numerator and the corrected p values are reported.

3. Results

3.1. Behavioral data

In general, participants’ performance at the grammatical judgment task was very high (hit rates: grammatical 95.10%, sd: 4.57; subject 91.77%, sd: 15.41; case 95.20%, sd: 5.04; grammatical object 93.95%, sd: 5.70; object 92.91%, sd: 7.46). Participants’ individual hit scores for each condition were 366 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA with the within factor “Condition” (grammatical, subject, case, grammatical object and object). There was no main effect of “Condition” (F(4,92) < 1).

3.2. Electrophysiological data

Fig. 1 displays the latencies and durations of the ERP effects elicited by each of the experimental conditions as revealed by the analysis of the 50 ms intervals. Grand-average waveforms for each violation type against the corresponding grammatical condition are displayed in Fig. 2 (subject- and object-agreement conditions) and Fig. 3 (ergative case condition). In Table 2 the F and p values are reported for the main ANOVAs. Statistical details of the posterior comparisons are detailed in the text.

3.2.1. Subject-agreement violation The analysis on the 50 ms time windows showed a reliable positive effect between 400 and 1000 ms. The subsequent ANOVA performed in this time window revealed a main effect of “Gram- maticality” and an interaction between the factors “Grammaticality” and “Region”. The separate comparison of “Grammaticality” for each region yielded a positive effect in the posterior region (t(23) ¼ 4.98, p < 0.001) and a strong trend in the frontal region (t(23) ¼ 2.02, p ¼ 0.054).

3.2.2. Object-agreement violation The analysis performed on the 50 ms intervals revealed a negative effect between 200 and 300 ms followed by a positive effect between 300 and 1150 ms. The subsequent ANOVA in the early time window showed an interaction between the factors “Grammaticality” and “Region” due to the negative deﬂection elicited by the ungrammatical sentence in the posterior region (t(23) ¼ 2.20, p < 0.05) that was not present in the frontal region (t(23) ¼ 1.45, p > 0.05). In the later time window between 300 and 1150 ms, a main effect of “Grammaticality” and an interaction between the factors “Grammaticality” and “Region” were present. Further analysis showed a more prominent positive effect in the posterior region (t(23) ¼ 5.30, p < 0.001) than in the frontal region (t(23) ¼ 2.57, p < 0.05).

Subject agreement violation Object agreement violation Ergative case violation

P600 P600 P600 - + Fp1 Fp1 Fp1 F3A F3A F3A p < 0.001 F1 F1 F1 p < 0.05 F3 F3 F3 F5 F5 F5 Left C1A C1A C1A C3A C3A C3A C5A C5A C5A

Fp2 Fp2 Fp2 Frontal F4A F4A F4A F2 F2 F2 F4 F4 F4 F6 F6 F6

Right C2A C2A C2A C4A C4A C4A C6A C6A C6A

C1P C1P C1P C3P C3P C3P TCP1 TCP1 TCP1 P1 P1 P1 P3 P3 P3 Left P5 P5 P5 P1P P1P P1P O1 O1 O1

C2P C2P C2P C4P C4P C4P Posterior TCP2 TCP2 TCP2 P2 P2 P2 P4 P4 P4

Right P6 P6 P6 P2P P2P P2P O2 O2 O2

00 500 1000 1500 00 500 1000 1500 00 500 1000 1500

Fig. 1. Results of the t test comparing for each experimental condition grammatical and ungrammatical sentences on 50 ms intervals for each electrode. The onset of the epoch corresponds to the beginning of the critical word (the auxiliary verb for the subject- and object-agreement conditions and the case marker of the second NP for the ergative case condition). Bars indicate signiﬁcant differences between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences (p < 0.05). Red bars display positive effects whereas blue bars display negative effects. ERP effects are only displayed when two or more successive 50 ms time windows showed reliable differences. B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 367

Fig. 2. Grand-average ERPs and isovoltage difference maps (ungrammatical minus grammatical) for subject- and object- agreement violation conditions. ERPs time-locked to the auxiliary verb (in bold).

3.2.3. Comparison between subject- and object-agreement violations A further repeated measures ANOVA with the additional factor “Agreement type” (Subject and Object) compared the late positive effects found in the two agreement conditions. In Table 3 the F and p values are reported for the factor “Agreement type” and its interactions. As showed in Table 3, the factor “Agreement type” reached signiﬁcant levels due a more positive voltage for the subject- agreement condition in general for grammatical and ungrammatical sentences (subject-agreement condition: 1.60 mV; object-agreement condition: 0.83 mV). Importantly, the factor “Agreement type” did not interact with the factor “Grammaticality”, which shows no differences in the P600 effect between the subject- and object-agreement conditions. Finally, the factor “Agreement” did not interact with any other factor.

ERGATIVE CASE VIOLATION

µV

0.5 1.0 1.5 s

300..1150 ms

-3 µV 6

P600 Mikelen arrebek egunkaria Mikelen arrebek *egunkariek

Fig. 3. Grand-average ERPs and isovoltage difference maps (ungrammatical minus grammatical) of the ergative case violation condition. ERPs time-locked to the case marker of the second NP (the critical case morphemes are in bold). 368 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373

Table 2 ANOVAs on mean ERP amplitudes for each violation condition.

Effect Subject violation Object violation Ergative case violation

400–1000 ms 200–300 ms 300–1150 ms 400–1250 ms G 19.72*** 2.27 21.65*** 13.33*** G R 8.59** 4.72* 13.18*** 13.13*** G H <1 <1 2.92 1.67 G R H <1 <1 <1 <1

The F values are reported, d.f. ¼ 1,23. G ¼ Grammaticality, R ¼ Region, H ¼ Hemisphere. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

3.2.4. Ergative case violation According to the analysis on the 50 ms intervals, a positive effect was present between 400 and 1250 ms. The ANOVA on this time window revealed a main effect of the factor “Grammaticality” and an interaction between the factors “Grammaticality” and “Region”. Further comparisons showed a positivity effect for “Grammaticality” more prominent in posterior (t(23) ¼ 5.11, p < 0.001) than in frontal (t(23) ¼ 2.53, p < 0.05) regions.

Table 3 ANOVAs on mean ERP amplitudes for subject and object-agreement conditions.

Effect P600 amplitude Ag type 10.11** Ag type G <1 Ag type G R <1 Ag type G H 3.81 Ag type G R H <1

The F values are reported, d.f. ¼ 1,23. Ag ¼ Agreement type, G ¼ Grammaticality, R ¼ Region, H ¼ Hemi- sphere. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

4. Discussion

The present study explored the processing of subject- and object-verb agreement and ergative case- morphology violations by adult native speakers of Basque. Both behavioral and electrophysiological measures were assessed during the performance of a delayed grammatical judgment task involving auditorily presented sentences. Participants accurately performed the grammatical judgment task for all three experimental conditions. Regarding the ERP results, a P600 effect was found for all three types of grammatical violations. These results are thus in line with previous studies in language processing where ungrammatical sentences were evaluated (Münte et al., 1997; Coulson et al., 1998; Hagoort & Brown, 2000; Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001; Angrilli, Penolazzi, Vespignani, De Vincenzi, Job & Ciccarelli, 2002; Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2005; Mueller et al., 2005, 2007; Rossi et al., 2005; Nevins et al., 2007; Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; Frenck-Mestre et al., 2008), Regarding its functional role, P600 has been classically interpreted as capturing processes of reanalysis and syntactic repair. However, the P600 is also triggered by syntactically well-formed sentences with a high degree of syntactic complexity (Kaan, Harris, Gibson, & Holcomb, 2000) or less preferred syntactic structures in temporarily ambiguous sentences (Osterhout, Holcomb, & Swinney, 1994). In addition, the syntactic nature of the P600 is questioned by recent studies which showed a P600 effect for the processing of sentences semantically not plausible in terms of thematic roles (but otherwise syntactically correct) (van Herten, Kolk, & Chwilla, 2005; van Herten, Chwilla, & Kolk, 2006). The authors take these results to B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 369 suggest that the P600 reflects a general monitoring mechanism the function of which is to examine the veridicality of the parsing. The present study shows that the processes indexed by the P600 component are independent not only of the specific grammatical computations but also of the core typological characteristics of the languages involved, such as alignment type (ergative versus nominative-accusative), head-parameter (SVO/SOV), or agreement type. This lack of specificity is consistent with both the traditional view of the P600 as a general marker of syntactic difficulties as well as with interpretation as a general conflict monitoring mechanism for language processing. We did not replicate the N400-P600 pattern reported in Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) for both subject and object verb-agreement violations. A major difference between these two studies is the agreement feature involved in the grammatical violation. In Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) the violation manipulated the person feature, while in the present study it was the number feature that generated agreement violations. Therefore, the contrast between our findings and those in Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) could be interpreted as signaling a sensitivity to the agreement feature involved in the violation. This interpretation would be in line with the one provided by Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009), whereby person agreement violations generate an N400 as a result of difficulties in thematic identification. In the case of number agreement violations, as the one used in the present study, no such argument identification difficulty would ensue. Few studies have specifically addressed the question of whether different features of agreement are processed differently. Nevins et al. (2007) studied processing responses to various verb agreement feature combinations in Hindi. Unlike Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009), they did not report an N400 for person agreement violations, but reported a larger P600 for feature combinations containing person, which they attributed to the greater salience of the person feature. In contrast to these results, a study conducted by Silva- Pereyra and Carreiras (2007) in Spanish reported no differences in person versus number agreement feature processing. Their experimental materials exploited the contrast between cant-o “I sing” and cant-amos “we sing” in Spanish. It is generally assumed in linguistics, since Jespersen (1933) and Lyons (1968), that we is not the plural of I. I is semantically indivisible and inherently singular, best represented by the feature [þspeaker] (Sørensen, 1958; Benveniste, 1971; Wierzbicka, 1972; Ingram, 1978; Goddard, 1995). Given this semantic and linguistic singularity of the contrast I versus we,itis possible that the lack of person versus number contrast reported by Silva-Pereyra and Carreiras (2007) was caused by their choice of experimental materials. In our materials, the number manipulation strictly involved the presence or absence of a morpheme that only denotes [þplurality], morpho- phonologically distinct from person morphemes (Laka, 1993b). Another factor accounting for the lack of N400 in our study concerns the modality of presentation of experimental materials. While in Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) sentences were presented visually, in this study sentences were presented auditorily, and prosodic cues in the present study might have helped disambiguate the grammatical function of the critical NPs, thus further minimizing the difficulty in argument identification. Given the view argued for by Nevins et al. (2007) and the present study, whereby different agreement features are distinctively processed, a question arises as to why the ERP correlates for person agreement violations reported are not the same in Nevins et al. (2007), Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009) and the present study. A possible explanation is found in the type of agreement explored in each of the languages studied: Hindi, where there is only one agreeing argument and Basque where there are two. In languages like Hindi with only one agreement on the verb there is no possibility of confusion regarding the thematic specification of the agreeing argument, and both person and/or number features would engage a P600 response (e.g. for number feature in English: Coulson et al., 1998; in German: Münte et al., 1997;in Dutch: Hagoort & Brown, 2000; in Spanish: Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; in Italian: Angrilli et al., 2002; and in French: Frenck-Mestre et al., 2008; for person feature in German: Rossi et al., 2005;in Hindi: Nevins et al., 2007; in Spanish: Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007; in French: Frenck-Mestre et al., 2008). However, in multiple agreement languages, like Basque, the grammatical function of the agreeing NPs would need to be recovered at verb position for agreement computations, and the violation would impede this identification process (Zawiszewski & Friederici, 2009). This hypothesis regarding differences in the processing of single versus multiple agreement is at this point in need of further validation by more evidence from future studies. 370 B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373

Another relevant issue is whether subject and object-agreement engage a comparable ERP pattern and, hence, the same brain mechanism in their computation. Contrary to Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009), who reported a larger P600 for subject-verb agreement violations, we did not find a modulation of the amplitude of the P600 effect elicited by each type of agreement violation. Therefore, the present results suggest that number verb agreement is a uniform process independently of the argument involved. For the object-agreement condition, we found in addition to the positive effect a posterior negativity between 200 and 300 ms. This posterior negativity could be an instance of the phonological N200 or an N400. Based on the typical scalp distributions and latencies of these two negativities, it is difficult to label this negativity since both N200 and N400 have a posterior distribution and their onset is around 200 ms. Despite the apparent similarities, these two negativities have a very distinct functional role. The N200 indexes the violation of phonological expectations build on semantic and syntactic context restrictions (van den Brink, Brown, & Hagoort, 2001; van den Brink & Hagoort, 2004). So far, we only know of one study that reported an N400 for verb agreement violations, Zawiszewski and Friederici (2009). In this study, the N400 was present for both subject and object-agreement violations as an index of the costs in thematic computations but was modulated by the argument involved in the violation (either subject or object argument). In the present study we only found an early negativity for the object-agreement violation but not for the subject agreement one. These results suggest that the negativity is not caused by general difficulties in the thematic processing during verbal agreement but it is rather specific to the object-agreement violation. In addition, in the present object-verb agreement condition, but not in the subject-verb agreement condition, participants’ expectations of a particular phoneme were violated. Due to the agreement constraints, participants probably always expected one specific auxiliary verb form, namely dituzte. However, the ungrammatical sentences embedded the auxiliary verb form dute which deviates phonologically from the expected verb already on the first vowel. In contrast, in the subject-verb agreement condition the violation becomes evident only after the first vowel as they expect dute and instead, they are presented with the verb form du sharing the initial phonemes with the grammatical form. Thus, the early mismatch between the expected and the incoming phonological information could have triggered an N200 effect for the object-verb agreement violation only. Therefore, the early negative effect observed for the object- agreement violations seems more likely to be an instance of the N200, signaling the violation of a phonological expectation. Regarding the ergative case violation, the presentation of a second subject-marked argument induced a P600 as in previous studies in nominative-accusative languages (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005; Mueller et al., 2005; Mueller et al., 2007). We did not replicate the N400 signature reported in Hindi by Choudhary et al. (2009). A plausible explanation to account for the differences in the results from Hindi and Basque is that Hindi is a split-ergative language, whereas Basque is not. In Hindi, only perfective sentences with agent arguments display ergative case (Mahajan, 1990), while in Basque all agents are marked with ergative with no exception (Laka, 2006b). Alternatively, the disparity between the present study and Choudhary et al. (2009) could be caused by the type of violations employed: our materials always included a correctly ergative marked NP, which did probably not induce a semantic difficulty in interpreting the agency of the ergative marked NP, contrary to the case in Choudhary et al. (2009). Nevertheless, the results of the present study resemble those of previous studies on double nominative markers (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005; Mueller et al., 2005; Mueller et al., 2007). The finding of equivalent ERP signatures engaged in the detection of NP case-marking violations, regardless of whether the language’s alignment type is ergative or nominative-accusative, converges with the prevailing view in current Linguistic Theory, that ergativity and accusativity are two grammatical choices in argument-marking, given a common thematic structure (McGregor, 2009; Aldridge, 2008). Whether this conclusion holds across different ergative languages is a question that needs to be addressed in future studies. It must be mentioned that the present ergative case violation involved the comparison of different types of case markers: correct sentences always had an absolutive case marker at the second NP, while incorrect sentences presented always an ergative case marker at that sentence position. One caveat is whether the P600 elicited by our ergative case violation is due to functional differences between the two cases. Previous studies in Basque (Erdocia et al., 2009; Zawiszewski & Friederici, 2009) suggest that B. Díaz et al. / Journal of Neurolinguistics 24 (2011) 357–373 371 the comparison between ergative and absolutive NPs per se in grammatical sentences does not engender late positivity effects (as appears to be the case in Hindi, Choudhary et al., 2009). However, these previous studies differed from the present one in the modality of stimuli presentation. Those previous studies were done in the visual modality and, therefore, no prosodic cue was provided to the participants. This modality difference could be of relevance since, as showed by Wolff, Schlesewsky, Hirotani, and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (2008), prosodic boundaries may create expectations about sentence continuation. This issue is left open to future studies. Summing up, all three grammatical violations investigated (ergative case-marking, subject and object verb-agreement) engaged conflict monitoring processes of language processing as revealed by the P600. In the object-verb agreement condition, an additional early negativity was found, possibly a marker of phonological expectations. In conclusion, the present study provides evidence of cross linguistically equivalent neural underpinnings for number verb agreement and case morphology processing, regardless of the typological traits of the languages studied. In addition, our results indicate that number verb agreement is a uniform, unique syntactic process, regardless of the arguments involved.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Pre-doctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government to Begoña Díaz. This research was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación with EU-FEDER Program (SEJ2009-09072; FFI2009-09695; Consolider-Ingenio 2010-CDS-2007-00012) and from the Basque Council for Education, Universities and Research (IT414-10). Núria Sebastián-Gallés received the prize “ICREA Acadèmia” for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The authors wish to thank Xavier Mayoral for technical assistance.

References

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