TASK EFFECTS 1 ERPs and Task Effects in the Auditory Processing of Gender Agreement and Semantics in French

We investigated task effects on violation ERP responses to Noun-Adjective gender mismatches and lexical/conceptual semantic mismatches in a combined auditory/visual paradigm in French. Participants listened to sentences while viewing pictures of objects. This paradigm was designed to investigate language processing in special populations (e.g., children) who may not be able to read or to provide stable behavioral judgment data. Our main goal was to determine how ERP responses to our target violations might differ depending on whether participants performed a judgment task (Task) versus listening for comprehension (No-Task). Characterizing the influence of the presence versus absence of judgment tasks on violation ERP responses allows us to meaningfully interpret data obtained using this paradigm without a behavioral task and relate them to judgment-based paradigms in the ERP literature. We replicated previously observed ERP patterns for semantic and gender mismatches, and found that the task especially affected the later P600 component. Acknowledgments: We thank Nicolas Bourguignon, Alex Gascon, Véronique Lebel, Benoît Jutras, and Daniel Valois for their help and participation in various stages in the development and running of this experiment. Funding for this project came from the SSHRC (Royle et al, 410-2009-0256), the NSERC (Steinhauer, # RGPGP 312835 and # RGPIN 402678-11) as well as the Canada Research Chair program (Steinhauer, CRC/CFI; project # 201876). No funding agency had any controlling impact on this study.