Paolo Lorusso

Lexical prediction does not interact with morphophonological (gender and number) prediction during early stages of sentence processing  

(Joint work with Mikel Santesteban, Anna Hatzidaki, Itziar Laka & Adam Zawiszewski)

During sentence comprehension we make predictions not only about upcoming words but also about their morphophonology based on both semantic and grammatical knowledge (Freuenberger & Roehm, 2016). But what is the timing of these processes and what can this tell us about information prediction prioritization? Previous research (see Martin-Loeches et al., 2006, for a review) has showed mixed evidence supporting either a syntax-first model (Friederici, 2002, 2011) that considers each source of information independently at initial stages and integrates it at later ones, or an interactive model (Hagoort, 2003) that considers all types of information right from early points of processing. We explore whether verb cloze-probability interacts with object-clitic agreement, and if so, at what stage(s) these processes interact in two ERPs studies on Spanish native. We found that at early processing stages, lexical/semantic prediction does not interact with morphophonological prediction, so that the two processes operate independently (in contrast to, i.a., Wicha et al., 2004). Morphophonological and semantic processing only interact at later stages where sentence integration, interpretation and repair processes take place, supporting the syntax-first model (Friederici 2002, 2011).