Definitely saw it coming: An ERP study on definiteness expectancy and gender expectancy in lexical prediction

Abstract

Previous studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that people predict specific nouns using contextual information by investigating effect at the prenominal article or adjective. Articles and adjectives whose grammatical gender marking did not match with the expected noun elicited greater ERPs than those with congruent marking. Yet, it is still unclear whether people really predict the noun at the time they read the prenominal article or adjective, or whether rather predict the specific form of the preceding article or adjective. If it is the former, how good of a predictive cue is grammatical gender? Using ERPs, this thesis attempts to answer these questions and investigates whether Dutch speakers are sensitive to the match/mismatch between the gender of a prenominal article and the gender of a highly predictable noun during discourse comprehension, and whether this sensitivity is altered when the article is expectedly definite or unexpectedly definite. The results show that the ERP effect evoked by unexpected gender, compared to expected, was small but was not affected by the expected or unexpected definiteness of the article. This tends to show that people do pre-activate the grammatical gender of the target noun at the prenominal article and that the cue is robust enough.