Examinando por Autor "Wicha, Nicole"

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    Anticipating Words and Their Gender: An Event-related Brain Potential Study of Semantic Integration, Gender Expectancy, and Gender Agreement in Spanish Sentence Reading
    (MIT Press Direct, 2004-09) Wicha, Nicole; Kutas, Marta; Moreno Bella, Eva
    Recent studies indicate that the human brain attends to and uses grammatical gender cues during sentence comprehension. Here, we examine the nature and time course of the effect of gender on word-by-word sentence reading. Eventrelated brain potentials were recorded to an article and noun, while native Spanish speakers read medium- to high-constraint Spanish sentences for comprehension. The noun either fit the sentence meaning or not, and matched the preceding article in gender or not; in addition, the preceding article was either expected or unexpected based on prior sentence context. Semantically anomalous nouns elicited an N400. Genderdisagreeing nouns elicited a posterior late positivity (P600), replicating previous findings for words. Gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted in both the N400 window—with a larger negativity frontally for double violations—and the P600 window—with a larger positivity for semantic anomalies, relative to the prestimulus baseline. Finally, unexpected articles elicited an enhanced positivity (500–700 msec post onset) relative to expected articles. Overall, our data indicate that readers anticipate and attend to the gender of both articles and nouns, and use gender in real time to maintain agreement and to build sentence meaning.
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    Code-switching and the brain
    (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Kutas, Marta; Wicha, Nicole; Moreno Bella, Eva
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    Expecting Gender: An Event Related Brain Potential Study on the Role of Grammatical Gender in Comprehending a Line Drawing Within a Written Sentence in Spanish
    (Elsevier, 2003) Wicha, Nicole; Kutas, Marta; Moreno Bella, Eva
    Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in written sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers read sentences in which a drawing depicting a target noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and either agreed or disagreed in gender with that of the preceding article. The gender-agreement violation at the drawing was associated with an enhanced negativity between 500 and 700 msec post-stimulus onset. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited a larger N400 than congruent drawings regardless of gender (dis)agreement, indicating little effect of grammatical gender agreement on contextual integration of a picture into a written sentence context. We also observed an enhanced negativity for articles with unexpected relative to expected gender based on prior sentence context indicating that readers generate expectations for specific nouns and their articles.
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    Potato not Pope: human brain potentials to gender expectation and agreement in Spanish spoken sentences
    (Elsevier, 2003-08-07) Wicha, Nicole; Bates, Elizabeth A.; Kutas, Marta; Moreno Bella, Eva
    Event-related potentials were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in auditory sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers listened to sentence pairs in which a drawing depicting a noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and agreed or disagreed in gender with the immediately preceding spoken article. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited an N400 regardless of gender agreement. A similar negativity to prior articles of gender opposite to that of the contextually expected noun suggests that listeners predict specific words during comprehension. Gender disagreements at the drawing also elicited an increased negativity with a later onset and distribution distinct from the canonical N400, indicating that comprehenders attend to gender agreement, even when one of the words is only implicitly represented by a drawing.
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    Real-Time Measures of the Multilingual Brain
    (Wiley, 2019-02-19) Wicha, Nicole; Carrasco Ortíz, Haydée; Moreno Bella, Eva
    This chapter discusses how the electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) methods have been used to study the multilingual brain. It introduces the methods, the physiological basis of the data obtained from them, and the advantages and disadvantages of the methods compared to each other and to other neuroimaging techniques. The chapter briefly presents how these techniques have been used to address questions about the multilingual brain. The most common way of analysing continuously recorded language-related EEG and MEG data is to extract event-related potentials (ERPs) or event-related fields (ERFs), respectively. In a neurocognitive framework, the mastery of a second language is thought to involve the ability not only to represent linguistic knowledge, but also to process linguistic input in a native-like manner. The chapter briefly presents a sample of studies that have measured the brain signatures for language switching, first in production then during written sentence comprehension, in bilinguals and professional simultaneous interpreters.