Similarities and differences between phrase structure and morphosyntactic violations in Spanish: An event-related potentials study

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed to compare word category and verb inflection violations in Spanish. A similar frontal negativity was found between 250-400 ms for both violation types, suggesting that they equally disrupt initial syntactic analyses. Also, word category violations elicited a negativity at posterior electrodes larger than verb inflection anomalies and correct sentences within this time window, probably reflecting difficulties to semantically analyse phrase structure violations. Finally, a centroparietal positivity in the 500-700 ms interval was found for both error types. Both violations did not differ along the first half of this interval (500-600 ms), but larger effects for verb inflection violations were reported along the second half of this period (600-700 ms). These findings suggest that whereas processes dealing with the reanalyses of sentence structure are equally triggered by both anomaly types, further attempts of repairing the structure of sentences occur only with verb inflection violations.