An ERP study of coreference in Spanish: Semantic and grammatical gender cues

We report two event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments aimed to investigate the roles played by semantic and syntactic information during pronoun resolution. The first experiment was designed to show that ambiguity of the pronoun (e.g., word class ambiguity) makes an important contribution to the pattern observed in previous ERP studies. As expected, the results showed a different ERP pattern for ambiguous and nonambiguous pronouns. The second experiment analyzed pronoun resolution when gender agreement and animacy were manipulated, using only unambiguous pronouns. Results showed P600 effects at 500 to 700?ms and at 700 to 900?ms. Amplitude of the second window was significantly greater for animate than for inanimate antecedents. The modulation of the agreement effect by animacy suggests that repair processes after grammatical disagreement detection are influenced by semantics.