Karsten Steinhauer

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• Professor (Neurobiology/Cognitive Neuroscience)
• Professor Emeritus at McGill University

The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates mechanisms underlying the processing of morphosyntactic information during real-time auditory sentence comprehension in French. Employing an auditory-visual sentence-picture matching paradigm, we investigated two types of anomalies using entirely grammatical auditory stimuli: (i) se...

Since the early 2000s, neurocognitive research on second language (L2) acquisition has been controversial as to how plastic the human brain is after puberty. Recent studies have extended this debate to first language loss (L1 attrition). This article gives an overview of the first event‐related brain potential (ERP) studies on L1 attrition and L2 l...

Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing. Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at constituent phrase as well as sentence frequencies reflect cortical tracking of overt or covert (implicit) prosodic groupi...

Mandarin Chinese is typologically unusual among the world’s languages in having flexible word order despite a near absence of inflectional morphology. These features of Mandarin challenge conventional linguistic notions such as subject and object and the divide between syntax and semantics. In the present study, we tested monolingual processing of...

Mandarin Chinese is typologically unusual among the world’s languages in having flexible word order despite a near absence of inflectional morphology. These features of Mandarin challenge conventional linguistic notions such as subject and object and the divide between syntax and semantics. In the present study, we tested monolingual processing of...

In morphologically richer languages, including French, one must learn the specific properties of number agreement in order to understand the language, and this learning process continues into adolescence. This study examined similarities and differences between French-speaking adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) when...

We used event-related brain potentials to compare the processing of French morphosyntactic gender violations between adolescents and adults. Results suggest that the French grammar is not yet fully mature at ages 10–16, and that age differences in acquisition patterns could depend on morphological regularity.

The rules governing adjective-noun order vary crosslinguistically, and event-related potentials have shown that violations of these rules elicit biphasic responses in native speakers and advanced non-native learners. We built on prior findings by replicating an English experiment and running a new experiment in Mandarin. In the replication, we test...

In this chapter, we critically review experiments on morphological processing focusing on compounds, derived and inflected words. Two main types of experiments are presented, those with single word or priming paradigms and those involving sentence processing, while focusing on morphological properties of words. We present as much cross-linguistic d...

Purpose This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of weakn...

(see also linked data Royle Extra pdf document SNL 20121.pdf) The French noun phrase (NP) offers parameters to study morphosyntactic (gender) and syntactic error processing. Gender agreement on adjectives can be irregularly marked (e.g., vert/e [vɛʁ/t], ‘green.M/F’), while singular definite determiners carry predictable transparent vowels for agree...

Late learners of Mandarin (L1 is English) can obtain qualitative native-like profiencey in processing mechansim of Mandarin sentences .

Gender-agreement errors on adjectives and determiners elicit different ERP patterns in French

See also "Gender-agreement errors on adjectives and determiners elicit different ERP patterns in French.pdf" for the abstract of the conference "Event-related potential (ERP) study on gender-agreement errors on determiners and adjectives in French".

Poster presented at the LiveMEEG Virtual Conference.

A bstract Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing (e.g., Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, & Poeppel, 2016). Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at sentence constituent frequencies reflect cortical tracking o...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01152.].

French adjective word-order is freer than in English, but not completely free. Adjective position relative to the noun can be predicted by their lexico-semantic category [1]; adjectives of magnitude/size such as 'big' are prenominal (PRE), colour adjectives are postnominal (POST). The present ERP study investigates 1) whether incorrect adjective or...

In this event-related potential (ERP) study we reevaluate syntax-first approaches to sentence processing by implementing a novel paradigm in French that includes correct sentences, pure syntactic category violations, lexical-semantic anomalies, and combined anomalies. Our balanced design systematically controlled for target word (noun vs. verb) and...

This poster presents preliminary analysis of Mandarin monolinguals' processing of noun-noun-verb sentences with and without the coverbs BA and BEI. Online behavioral judgments show that without BA and BEI, conceptual knowledge of semantic roles drives actor assignment. Additionally, in the absence of any cues, participants showed no preference for...

We find differing ERP patterns to violations based on (1) condition (within category THEMatic structure–i.e., re- cannot affix an intransitive verb *re-smile–vs. syntactic CATegory errors–N, Adj, V, e.g., *re-flat), (2) L1 or L2 status and (3) L2 proficiency as measured by behavioural results. However, proficiency only affects L2 ERP patterns. L1...

The extent to which non-native speakers are sensitive to morphological structure during language processing remains a matter of debate. The present study used a masked-priming lexical decision task with simultaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) recording to investigate whether native and non-native speakers of French yield similar or different beh...

Studies employing primed lexical decision tasks have revealed morphological facilitation effects in children and young adults. It is unknown if this effect is preserved or diminished in older adults. In fact, only few studies have investigated age-related changes in morphological processing and results are inconsistent across studies. To address th...

In French, many adjectives are marked for masculine and feminine gender, which has to agree with the gender of the noun they modify, however gender marking is not transparent: there is no regular inflectional suffix: 1. Le poisson(m) vert [vɛ:ʁ] ‘The green fish’_(m) 2. La cuillère(f) verte [vɛʁt] ‘The green spoon’_(f) There is some controversy...

Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2018)

Full reference: Courteau, É., Fromont, L. A., Royle, P., & Steinhauer, K. (2018, 18 March, 2018). Gender agreement and semantic processing in French children: ERP effects of age and proficiency. Paper presented at the 31st CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, UC Davis, CA. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28154.59840

The role of prosodic information in sentence processing is not usually addressed in second language (L2) instruction, and neurocognitive studies on prosody–syntax interactions are rare. Here we compare event-related potentials (ERP) of Chinese and German learners of English L2 to those of native English speakers and show how first language (L1) bac...

In their target article, Schmid and Köpke (2017; henceforth S&K) aim to (1) show that L1 attrition research is key to informing, challenging and validating theories on bilingualism, (2) review how later learned languages can re-shape the L1 in the immediate and longer term, and (3) challenge what they consider preconceived notions on attrition. Alt...

Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (2017)

Noun and verb processing in French during sentence comprehension - an ERP study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is frequently associated with communicative impairment, regardless of intelligence level or mental age. Impairment of prosodic processing in particular is a common feature of ASD. Despite extensive overlap in neural resources involved in prosody and music processing, music perception seems to be spared in this populat...

First language (L1) attrition in adulthood offers new insight on neuroplasticity and the role of language experience in shaping neurocognitive responses to language. Attriters are multilinguals for whom advancing L2 proficiency comes at the cost of the L1, as they experience a shift in exposure and dominance (e.g., due to immigration). To date, the...

Appendix S1. An example of data patterns with the original baseline correction (−200 to 0 ms). The N400, frontal positivity, and P600 effects we reported on the verb for Attriters (with a baseline of −200 to 200 ms) were also reliable with this original baseline.

Appendix S2. An illustration of the larger frontal positivity / P3a amplitudes on the verb during the first half of the experiment compared to the second half (for all subjects).

Which cognitive processes are reflected by the N400 in ERPs is still controversial. Various recent articles (Lau et al., 2008; Brouwer et al., 2012) have revived the idea that only processes during word-retrieval (such as automatic spreading activation, ASA) are strongly supported, while post-lexical integrative processes are not. The present ERP s...

http://tedlab.mit.edu/cuny_abstracts/348_Final_Manuscript.pdf

Although research on multilingualism has revealed continued neuroplasticity for language-learning beyond what was previously expected, it remains controversial whether and to what extent a second language (L2) acquired in adulthood may induce changes in the neurocognitive processing of a first language (L1). First language (L1) attrition in adultho...

Using event related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the neurocognitive basis of phonological discrimination of phoneme /h/ in native English speakers and Francophone late second language (L2) learners, as a function of L2 proficiency and stimulus/task demands. In Experiment 1, native and non-native (L2 only) phonological contrasts were present...

According to Friederici’s (2002, 2011) extremely influential “syntax-first” model of sentence processing, each incoming word of a sentence is initially analyzed in terms of its syntactic word category (noun, verb, etc) in order to create a coherent phrase-structure representation (Phase 1: 100-300 ms). This syntactic representation is essential to...

The nature of cognitive processes underlying the N400 component in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) is still controversial. Semantic priming, which reduces N400 amplitudes, is not systematically observed in tasks that inhibit conscious processing of the prime (see e.g., Royle, et al., 2012 for a review). However, when the prime is consciously...

First language (L1) attrition is a socio-linguistic circumstance where second language (L2) learning coincides with changes in exposure and use of the native-L1. Attriters often report experiencing a decline in automaticity or proficiency in their L1 after a prolonged period in the L2 environment, while their L2 proficiency continues to strengthen....

French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use th...

This study presents the first two ERP reading studies of comma-induced effects of covert (implicit) prosody on syntactic parsing decisions in English. The first experiment used a balanced 2 × 2 design in which the presence/absence of commas determined plausibility (e.g., John, said Mary, was the nicest boy at the party vs. John said Mary was the ni...

The processing of prosodic phrase boundaries in language is immediately reflected by a specific event-related potential component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). A component somewhat reminiscent of the CPS in language has also been reported for musical phrases (i.e., the so-called ‘music CPS’). However, in previous studies the quantificati...

Les potentiels évoqués (PÉs), permettent d’analyser le traitement du langage en temps réel. Cependant, cette technique est limitée par des contraintes méthodologiques, trop souvent négligées. Par exemple, l’influent modèle “syntaxe en premier” proposé par Friederici (2002) s’appuie sur la découverte d’une étape de traitement syntaxique, reflétée pa...

Acquisition of ADJ(ective) gender agreement (masculine-feminine) in French is mastered later than DET(erminer) agreement (Royle & Valois 2010) due to irregular morphology. However, cognitive processes underlying gender acquisition have rarely been addressed (Royle & Courteau 2014). Few ERP studies focus on ADJ-noun agreement and most study morpholo...

Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language

Talk given at the biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception & Cognition, Nashville, USA.

The notion of a critical-period for second-language-learning is controversial; it is unresolved whether maturational constraints on neuroplasticity limit the ]";“native-likeness]";” of neurocognitive mechanisms underlying L2-processing, or whether other factors (e.g. exposure or proficiency) have a greater impact than age-of-acquisition on language...

Early studies demonstrating systematic ERP differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) are often cited as ‘hard evidence’ for the ‘critical period hypothesis’ (CPH), postulating that loss of brain plasticity in childhood requires adult L2 learners to rely on different brain mechanisms Weber-Fox and Neville, 1996). However, rece...

Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we measured pre-attentive processing involved in native vowel perception as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) in monolingual and simultaneous bilingual (SB) users of Canadian English and Canadian French in response to various pairings of four vowels: English /u/, French /u/, French /y/, and a co...

This article provides a selective overview of recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies in L2 morpho-syntax, demonstrating that the ERP evidence supporting the critical period hypothesis (CPH) may be less compelling than previously thought. The article starts with a general introduction to ERP methodology and language-related ERP profiles...

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., chi...

The status of eLAN and LAN type effects in syntax ERP research is controversial. Verb–noun swaps (e.g., He wanted to *meal... He wanted the *enjoy...) elicited left temporal negativities while function word swaps (He ate the *from...) elicited fronto-central negativities, in contrast to lexico-semantic conditions, where N400 were elicited.

This longitudinal study tracked the neuro-cognitive changes associated with second language (L2) grammar learning in adults in order to investigate how L2 processing is shaped by a learner's first language (L1) background and L2 proficiency. Previous studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have argued that late L2 learners cannot elicit a P60...

Morphological aspects of human language processing have been suggested by some to be reducible to the combination of orthographic and semantic effects, while others propose that morphological structure is represented separately from semantics and orthography and involves distinct neuro-cognitive processing mechanisms. Here we used event-related bra...

The present study aimed to refine current hypotheses regarding thematic reversal anomalies, which have been found to elicit either N400 or - more frequently - "semantic-P600" (sP600) effects. Our goal was to investigate whether distinct ERP profiles reflect aspectual-thematic differences between Agent-Subject Verbs (ASVs; e.g., 'to eat') and Experi...

It is widely believed that adults cannot learn a foreign language in the same way that children learn a first language. However, recent evidence suggests that adult learners of a foreign language can come to rely on native-like language brain mechanisms. Here, we show that the type of language training crucially impacts this outcome. We used an art...

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of “implicit prosody.” Ambiguous Korean sentence begin...

In reading, a comma in the wrong place can cause more severe misunderstandings than the lack of a required comma. Here, we used ERPs to demonstrate that a similar effect holds for prosodic boundaries in spoken language. Participants judged the acceptability of temporarily ambiguous English “garden path” sentences whose prosodic boundaries were eith...

We present a study using event-related potentials (ERPs) for gender, and semantic processing in French. We created mismatches between spoken sentences and picture stimuli (1) to elicit ERPs. A number of components were expected in the different conditions. Picture: White fish in box 1.a “Il y a un CRAYON blanc dans la boîte” ‘there is a white crayo...

We present a study using event-related potentials (ERPs) for gender and semantic processing in French. We investigated whether the Anterior negativites (e.g., (L)AN), N400 and P600 arise in adults contrasting Task versus No-Task conditions. We wanted to establish that these ERP components can arise without Task and could thus be used in special po...

We used event-related potentials to examine the interaction between two dimensions of discourse comprehension: (i) referential dependencies across sentences (e.g. between the pronoun 'it' and its antecedent 'a novel' in: 'John is reading a novel. It ends quite abruptly'), and (ii) the distinction between reference to events/situations and entities/...

This study employed an artificial language learning paradigm together with a combined behavioral/event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neurocognition of the processing of gender agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology that is problematic in adult second language (L2) learning. Subjects learned to speak and comprehend an arti...

Research shows that older adults may be more sensitive than young adults to prosody, although performance varies depending on task requirements. Here we used electroencephalography to examine responses to simple phrases produced with an Early or Late boundary, presented with matching or mismatching visual displays. While some older adults successfu...

This event-related potential study examined how the human brain integrates (i) structural preferences, (ii) lexical biases, and (iii) prosodic information when listeners encounter ambiguous 'garden path' sentences. Data showed that in the absence of overt prosodic boundaries, verb-intrinsic transitivity biases influence parsing preferences (late cl...

Listeners' aesthetic and emotional responses to music typically occur in the context of long musical passages that contain structures defined in terms of the events that precede them. We describe an electrophysiological study of listeners' brain responses to musical accents that coincided in longer musical sequences. Musically trained listeners per...

MMN responses reflect whether language users have developed long-term memory traces in response to phonemes and whether they are able to perceive small acoustic changes within speech sound categories. Subtle acoustic changes within phonemes are often irrelevant to monolingual perceivers, but can be crucial for bilingual perceivers if the acoustic c...

In infants, discrimination of a vowel change presented in one direction is often significantly better compared to the same change presented in the reverse direction. These directional asymmetries reveal a language-universal bias favoring vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties (peripheral in F1F2 vowel space). In adults, asymmetries ar...

The ways in which age of acquisition (AoA) may affect (morpho)syntax in second language acquisition (SLA) are discussed. We suggest that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide an appropriate online measure to test some such effects. ERP findings of the past decade are reviewed with a focus on recent and ongoing research. It is concluded that...

Vowel perception patterns of monolingual (English and French) and simultaneous bilingual (English/French) adults were investigated using an unattended auditory oddball paradigm. The discrimination abilities of each language group were measured in response to four vowels whose phonemic status varied between languages: French [u], English [u], French...

Why bother recording event-related brain potentials (ERP) in language studies? What is their " added value? " We attempt to answer these questions by providing an overview of recent ERP work investigating word segmentation and phonological analysis during speech processing, semantic integration mechanisms, syn-tactic processing, and the analysis of...