Capturing language change through EEG : weaker P600 for a fading gender value in a southern Italo-Romance dialect

Grammatical gender processing is a classic topic in the neurolinguistic literature. However, most of the studies consider major standard languages, such as English, Dutch, Spanish or Italian. This is a limitation, since these languages display relatively simple systems that are fairly stable and do not allow to address language variation and change. Here we investigated gender agreement in a dialect of Southern Italy spoken in Agnone, using Event-Related Potentials. Compared with Italian and most standard Romance languages, the Agnonese gender system is more complex (with three target genders: feminine, masculine, neuter) and, also under the pressure of standard Italian, undergoing change, with the neuter merging into the masculine. Results showed that all determiner-noun gender mismatches elicited robust P600 and moderate Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) effects. Yet not all violations involving neuter nouns were equally outright. For masculine-neuter, the amplitude of the P600 was less pronounced than for feminine-neuter violations. Moreover, when looking at individual differences, the P600 for masculine-neuter was progressively reduced as participants’ competence in the Agnonese conservative variety decreased. Since sociolinguistics shows that individual variation within the speech community may reflect linguistic change, the smaller P600 exhibited by less conservative speakers could be described as a brain signature of ongoing language change in the Agnonese gender system. In other words, the attenuation of ungrammaticality-driven brain responses may provide a measurable indicator of the fading of the neuter and its merging into the masculine. This work paves the way to the neurolinguistic description of non-standard varieties and also breaks ground for a “diachronic neurolinguistics”, extending investigation into the neurobiology of language beyond the synchronic dimension.