Abstract(s)
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.