Conceptual anaphora. An event-related brain potential study

Abstract

The interpretation of anaphoric expressions depends on factors ranging from purely linguistic to those based on general world knowledge. In English and Spanish, plural anaphoric expressions referring to singular collective nouns are often preferred and read faster, despite the violations of number agreement between the anaphor and its antecedent. This study examines the event related brain potentials of monolingual Mexican Spanish young speakers when reading sentences in Spanish with zero anaphora (omission of pronoun in subject position in Spanish) that are coreferential with morphologically singular collective nouns. Thus, processing a verb (plural) in a second clause referring to a collective noun (singular; e.g., La banda de Jazz estuvo en el auditorio nacional. Tocaron durante 3 horas seguidas; The Jazz band was at the National Auditorium. They played for 3 h straight) generated a smaller P200 and larger N400 amplitude compared to the brain response to a verb (singular) in number agreement expressions (The Jazz band … It played …). However, the behavioral response showed no differences between conditions. These results could suggest that morphosyntactic and pragmatic constraints are likely available in parallel during the processing of conceptual anaphora, as grammatically illegal expressions with collective antecedent do not pose difficulties in comprehension.