Anaphoric agreement violation: An ERP analysis of its interpretation

In the present study we analyzed the processing of grammatically anomalous sentences like “∗The famous dancerwerenervously preparingherself/themselvesto face the crowd. ”, which contains two anomalies, one early and one late. We investigated how processing of the later anomaly (at the pronoun ‘herself ’ or ‘themselves ’) was affected by the processing of the early anomaly (at ‘were ’). We considered two processing scenarios involving the first anomaly: (1) The representation of the subject–verb number agreement error at the first verb is coerced to match the verb, rendering ‘herself ’ anomalous; (2) The representation of the subject–verb agreement error is coerced to match the subject noun, rendering ‘themselves ’ anomalous. Our dependent measure was event-related scalp potentials (ERPs). When the pronoun disagreed with the verb (and agreed with the subject), a P600 was recorded, while the opposite condition elicited no reliable effect. Our data suggest that interpretation of reflexive pronouns involves the reactivation of multiple lexical items, verbs included.