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Electrophysiological correlates of sociolinguistic variation: ERP responses and attenuation effects in standard and non-standard subject-verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese.
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Marije Soto1, Wellington Couto de Almeida1; 1Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Little research has examined the neurophysiology of sociolinguistic variation processing. In the domain of subject-verb agreement — a rich source of variation — prior work has treated morphosyntax in binary terms: either grammatical/standard or ungrammatical [1]. However, variants often occupy a gray area between standard and ungrammatical forms rarely investigated by real-time measures such as ERP. This study addresses this gap by examining 3rd person plural standard and non-standard verbal inflection, both commonly heard in Brazilian Portuguese from Rio de Janeiro across all neighborhoods in varying proportions. We tested three hypotheses: (i) non-standard variants are processed more like standard variants than like ungrammatical forms, assuming the speaker is exposed to variable input; (ii) upon hearing several instances of the non-standard variant, listeners' responses are quickly attenuated, reflecting listeners' flexibility in light of the ubiquity of sociolinguistic variation; (iii) socioeconomic groups with different exposure histories will respond differently to the non-standard variant. Our design presented two within-subject factors, grammaticality and occurrence, and one between-subject factor, degree of previous exposure to the non-standard variant. We recorded EEG from undergraduate (N = 27) and high-school students (N = 27) — the latter from a region highly productive of the stigmatized non-standard variant — who listened to pseudo-interviews recorded by young adult cariocas. Three conditions varied verbal inflection: (i) standard (e.g. Eles falam — 3P.PL); (ii) non-standard (e.g. Eles fala — 3P); or (iii) ungrammatical (e.g. *Eles fale — subjunctive). Stimuli were controlled for length, critical word position, and normed for plausibility, and perceptual salience. Both groups processed ungrammaticality differently from variants, consistent with our hypotheses. Undergraduate students showed higher sensitivity to ungrammaticality, with a significant anterior-central negativity at 300–500 ms during the first occurrence, suggesting a working memory load effect [2]. High-school students showed LAN-like effects but only during the third occurrence. For non-standard variant, no significant effects emerged among undergraduates; while high-school students showed a single second-occurrence anterior-central negativity. We speculate that early processing costs may be masked due to the highly contextualized sentence structure. In a similar self-paced reading study [3], we found increased processing costs to the non-standard variant from the 1st occurrence in both groups, suggesting that ERP effects spill over into later time windows and subsequent occurrences. University students seem to attenuate responses to non-standard variants immediately; whereas, high school students are more unstable in their response. We speculate that exposure to the variant may affect processing less than the associated knowledge regarding its fit depending on pragmatics: high school students showed greater conservatism in a complementary questionnaire, with little sensitivity for context. Overall, this study sheds light on the neurophysiology of sociolinguistic variation, which is underrepresented in cognitive neuroscience despite being a universal feature of language. While results challenge prescriptive binary assumptions, the role of attenuation across occurrences remains to be explored. [1] SOTO; ALMEIDA, 2021. [2] TERRY [3] ALMEIDA, 2023
Topic Areas: Morphology, Multilingualism