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The timecourse of the interaction between syntactic and semantic information during sentence processing in monolingual native English speakers was investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs). To examine the effects of semantic information on syntactic processing, the results for normal English sentences were compared to those for semantically impoverished nonsense (Jabberwocky) sentences. Within each sentence type condition, half of the sentences contained a syntactic violation. Violations elicited a larger amplitude N1 and more negative ERPs around 200 ms after the onset of the critical word relative to the grammatical condition. Although these effects were observed in both sentence types, they were anteriorly distributed for English sentences only. Moreover, the P600 elicited by the syntactic violation was attenuated in processing Jabberwocky as compared to English sentences. These results suggest that semantic and syntactic information are integrated during the earlier stages of syntactic processing indexed by the anterior negativities, and that these interactions continue in the later stages of processing indexed by the P600.

Syntactic violations in speech and music have been shown to elicit an anterior negativity (AN) as early as 100 ms after violation onset and a posterior positivity that peaks at roughly 600 ms (P600/LPC). The language AN is typically reported as left-lateralized (LAN), whereas the music AN is typically reported as right-lateralized (RAN). However, several lines of evidence suggest syntactic processing of language and music rely on overlapping neural systems. The current study tested the hypothesis that syntactic processing of speech and music share neural resources by examining whether musical proficiency modulates ERP indices of linguistic syntactic processing. ERPs were measured in response to syntactic violations in sentences and chord progressions in musicians and non-musicians. Violations in speech were insertion errors in normal and semantically impoverished English sentences. Violations in music were out-of-key chord substitutions from distantly and closely related keys. Phrase-structure violations elicited an AN and P600 in both groups. Harmonic violations elicited an LPC in both groups, blatant harmonic violations also elicited a RAN in musicians only. Cross-domain effects of musical proficiency were similar to previously reported within-domain effects of linguistic proficiency on the distribution of the language AN; syntactic violations in normal English sentences elicited a LAN in musicians and a bilateral AN in non-musicians. The late positivities elicited by violations differed in latency and distribution between domains. These results suggest that initial processing of syntactic violations in language and music relies on shared neural resources in the general population, and that musical expertise results in more specialized cortical organization of syntactic processing in both domains.

While grammatical aspects of language are preserved, executive deficits are prominent in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Parkinson’s dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We examined executive control during sentence processing in LBSD by assessing temporary structural ambiguities. Using an on-line word detection procedure, patients heard sentences with a syntactic structure that has high-compatibility or low-compatibility with the main verb’s statistically preferred syntactic structure, and half of the sentences were lengthened strategically between the onset of the ambiguity and its resolution. We found selectively slowed processing of lengthened ambiguous sentences in the PDD/DLB subgroup. This correlated with impairments on measures of executive control. Regression analyses related the working memory deficit during ambiguous sentence processing to significant cortical thinning in frontal and parietal regions. These findings emphasize the role of prefrontal disease in the executive limitations that interfere with processing ambiguous sentences in LBSD.

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g. “Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.”) categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they “undergenerate”); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and explaining the data on verb phrase-ellipsis. Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a “VP recycling hypothesis,” which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand. Experiments 1 and 2 used verb phrase ellipsis sentences with antecedents ranging from perfect (a verb phrase in matrix verb phrase position) to impossible (a verb phrase containing only a deverbal word). Experiments 3 and 4 contrasted antecedents in verbal versus nominal gerund subjects. Experiment 5 explored the possibility that speakers are particularly likely to go beyond the grammar and produce elided constituents without perfect matching antecedents when the antecedent needed is less marked than the antecedent actually produced. This experiment contrasted active (unmarked) and passive antecedents to show that readers seem to honor such a tendency.

Purpose

Previous findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation and/or engage the articulatory loop for silent speech.

Method

Syntactic and semantic processing constraints were examined in AWS and adults who are normally fluent (AWNF) by assessing their behavioral performance and ERPs in a natural speech listening task.

Results

AWS performed similarly to AWNF in identifying verb-agreement violations and semantic anomalies, but ERPs elicited by syntactic and semantic constraints indicated atypical neural functions for AWS. ERPs of the AWNF displayed an expected N400 for reduced semantic expectations and a typical P600 for verb-agreement violations. In contrast, both N400s and P600s for the semantic and verb-agreement conditions were observed in the ERPs of the AWS.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that AWS may engage semantic-syntactic mechanisms more generally for semantic and syntactic processing. These findings converge with earlier studies using visual stimuli to indicate that, while linguistic abilities are normal in AWS, underlying brain activity mediating some aspects of language processing may function differently.

This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the processing of coordinate structures in Chinese sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Chinese readers as they read sentences consisting of two independent clauses connected by the word huo zhe. The data strongly confirmed readers' preference for an initial noun phrase (NP)-coordination parsing in Chinese coordination structure. When huo zhe was absent from the beginning of a sentence, we identified a cost associated with abandoning the NP-coordination analysis, which was evident with regard to the second NP when the coordination was unambiguous. Otherwise, this cost was evident with regard to the verb, the syntactically disambiguating region, when the coordination was ambiguous. However, the presence of a sentence-initial huo zhe reduced reading times and regressions in the huo zhe NP and the verb regions. We believe that the word huo zhe at the beginning of a sentence helps the reader predict that the sentence contains a parallel structure. Before the corresponding phrases appear, the readers can use the word huo zhe and the language structure thereafter to predicatively construct the syntactic structure. Such predictive capability can eliminate the reader's preference for NP-coordination analysis. Implications for top-down parsing theory and models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as Last night, I walking home. As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs’ morphology based on temporal information at the conceptual level, accessing syntactic well-formedness constraints of verbal morphology, and encoding morphophonological form. We investigate these aspects of encoding verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia. Using three sentence completion experiments, it was demonstrated that production of verb inflections was impaired whenever temporal reference was involved; while morphological complexity and syntactic constraints were less likely to be the source of verb inflection errors in agrammatism. These findings are discussed in relation to current language production models.

For the past 150 years, neurobiological models of language have debated the role of key brain regions in language function. One consistently debated set of issues concern the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in syntactic processing. Here we combine measures of functional activity, grey matter integrity and performance in patients with left hemisphere damage and healthy participants to ask whether the left inferior frontal gyrus is essential for syntactic processing. In a functional neuroimaging study, participants listened to spoken sentences that either contained a syntactically ambiguous or matched unambiguous phrase. Behavioural data on three tests of syntactic processing were subsequently collected. In controls, syntactic processing co-activated left hemisphere Brodmann areas 45/47 and posterior middle temporal gyrus. Activity in a left parietal cluster was sensitive to working memory demands in both patients and controls. Exploiting the variability in lesion location and performance in the patients, voxel-based correlational analyses showed that tissue integrity and neural activity—primarily in left Brodmann area 45 and posterior middle temporal gyrus—were correlated with preserved syntactic performance, but unlike the controls, patients were insensitive to syntactic preferences, reflecting their syntactic deficit. These results argue for the essential contribution of the left inferior frontal gyrus in syntactic analysis and highlight the functional relationship between left Brodmann area 45 and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus, suggesting that when this relationship breaks down, through damage to either region or to the connections between them, syntactic processing is impaired. On this view, the left inferior frontal gyrus may not itself be specialized for syntactic processing, but plays an essential role in the neural network that carries out syntactic computations.

Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N=30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused perturbations in eye-movements. Subsequent to the anomaly, the patterns diverged. Syntactic anomaly generated many regressions initially, with rapid return to baseline. Pragmatic anomaly resulted in lengthened reading times, followed by a gradual increase in regressions that reached a maximum at the end of the sentence. Evidence of rapid sensitivity to pragmatic information supports the use of timing data in resolving the debate over the autonomy of linguistic processing. The divergent patterns of eye-movements support indications from neuro-cognitive studies of a principled distinction between syntactic and pragmatic processing procedures within the language processing mechanism.

Background

It is well known that both semantic and syntactic information play a role in pronoun resolution in sentences. However, it is unclear what the relative contribution of these sources of information is for the establishment of a coreferential relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent in combination with a local structural case constraint on the pronoun (i.e. case assignment of a pronoun under preposition governing). In a prepositional phrase in German and Dutch, it is the preposition that assigns case to the pronoun. Furthermore, in these languages different overtly case-marked pronouns are used to refer to male and female persons. Thus, one can manipulate biological/syntactic gender features separately from case marking features.

The major aim of this study was to determine what the influence of gender information in combination with a local structural case constraint is on the processing of a personal pronoun in a sentence.

Event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments were performed in German and in Dutch. In a word by word sentence reading study in German and Dutch, gender congruency between the antecedent and the pronoun was manipulated and/or case assignment by the preposition was violated while ERPs of young native speakers were recorded.

Results

The German and the Dutch ERP data showed an enlarged negativity broadly distributed starting approximately 350 ms after onset of the pronoun followed by a late positivity for gender violations. For syntactic incongruencies without gender violations only a positivity was present. The Dutch data showed an earlier onset of the positivity in comparison to German.

Conclusion

Finding negativities and positivities for conditions with a gender violation indicates that pronoun resolution with gender incongruency between the pronoun and the antecedent suffers from semantic as well as syntactic integration problems. The presence of a positivity for the syntactically incongruent conditions without gender violations suggests that the processing of incorrect case marking without a gender violation gives rise to syntactic but not semantic integration problems. We suggest that the more prominent case violation in Dutch caused the earlier onset of the positivity in the Dutch study. In addition, the pattern of ERP effects shows that both case and gender information are used almost immediately implying that the local structural constraint affects the resolution process with more processing activity than for a pronoun of which only one source of information is violated or incongruent.

Background

To examine which language function depends on early experience, the present study compared deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers and hearing German native speakers while processing German sentences. The participants watched simple written sentences while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. At the end of each sentence they were asked to judge whether the sentence was correct or not. Two types of violations were introduced in the middle of the sentence: a semantically implausible noun or a violation of subject-verb number agreement.

Results

The results showed a similar ERP pattern after semantic violations (an N400 followed by a positivity) in all three groups. After syntactic violations, native German speakers and native signers of German sign language (DGS) with German as second language (L2) showed a left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600, whereas no LAN but a negativity over the right hemisphere instead was found in deaf participants with a delayed onset of first language (L1) acquisition. The P600 of this group had a smaller amplitude and a different scalp distribution as compared to German native speakers.

Conclusions

The results of the present study suggest that language deprivation in early childhood alters the cerebral organization of syntactic language processing mechanisms for L2. Semantic language processing instead was unaffected.

Multiple neurocognitive subsystems are involved in resolving lexical ambiguity under different circumstances. We examined how processing in these subsystems changes with normal aging by comparing ERP responses to homographs and unambiguous words completing congruent sentences (with both semantic and syntactic contextual information) or syntactic prose (syntactic information only). Like young adults in prior work, older adults elicited more negative N400s to homographs in congruent sentences, suggesting mismatch between the context and residual activation of the contextually-irrelevant sense. However, the frontal negativity seen in young adults to homographs in syntactically well-defined but semantically neutral contexts was absent in older adults as a group, suggesting decline in recruiting additional neural resources to aid difficult semantic selection. A subset of older adults with high verbal fluency maintained a young-like effect pattern.

Two experiments investigated the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity and differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing. In one experiment, readers comprehended sentences containing main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities that all resolved to the reduced-relative interpretation. High-span (but not low-span) readers processed sentences more slowly when the sentences were biased to the preferred, main-verb interpretation than when they were biased to the reduced-relative interpretation. Moreover, high-span (but not low-span) readers used information about the plausibility of the different interpretations even though low-span readers appeared to possess the requisite knowledge. In Experiment 2, readers received intensive exposure to sentences with main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities. Exposure enhanced low-span readers’ use of plausibility information. Moreover, the effect of exposure generalized to sentences that were not included in the training materials.

We show that comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined readers’ expectations for high/low relative clause attachments following implicit-causality and non-implicit-causality verbs (John detests/babysits the children of the musician who…). In the off-line study, the widely reported low-attachment preference for English is observed in the non-implicit causality condition, but this preference gives way to more high attachments in the implicit causality condition in cases in which (i) the verb’s causally implicated referent occupies the high-attachment position and (ii) the relative clause provides an explanation for the event described by the matrix clause (e.g., …who are arrogant and rude). In the on-line study, a similar preference for high attachment emerges in the implicit causality context—crucially, before the occurrence of any linguistic evidence that the RC does in fact provide an explanation—whereas the low-attachment preference is consistent elsewhere. These findings constitute the first demonstration that expectations about ensuing discourse coherence relationships can elicit full reversals in syntactic attachment preferences, and that these discourse-level expectations can affect on-line disambiguation as rapidly as lexical and morphosyntactic cues.

An eye-tracking study explored Korean speaking adults’ and 4–5-year-olds’ ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children but not adults had difficulty recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; yet in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence. The findings implicate a general cross-linguistic pattern for parsing development, in which late developing cognitive control abilities mediate the recovery from so-called ‘garden-path’ sentences. Children’s limited cognitive control prevents them from inhibiting misinterpretations even when the disambiguating evidence comes from highly informative verb information.

Does the brain of a bilingual process language differently from that of a monolingual? We compared how bilinguals and monolinguals recruit classic language brain areas in response to a language task and asked whether there is a “neural signature” of bilingualism. Highly proficient and early-exposed adult Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals participated. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants completed a syntactic “sentence judgment task” [Caplan, D., Alpert, N., & Waters, G. Effects of syntactic structure and propositional number on patterns of regional cerebral blood flow. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 541-552, 1998]. The sentences exploited differences between Spanish and English linguistic properties, allowing us to explore similarities and differences in behavioral and neural responses between bilinguals and monolinguals, and between a bilingual's two languages. If bilinguals' neural processing differs across their two languages, then differential behavioral and neural patterns should be observed in Spanish and English. Results show that behaviorally, in English, bilinguals and monolinguals had the same speed and accuracy, yet, as predicted from the Spanish-English structural differences, bilinguals had a different pattern of performance in Spanish. fMRI analyses revealed that both monolinguals (in one language) and bilinguals (in each language) showed predicted increases in activation in classic language areas (e.g., left inferior frontal cortex, LIFC), with any neural differences between the bilingual's two languages being principled and predictable based on the morphosyntactic differences between Spanish and English. However, an important difference was that bilinguals had a significantly greater increase in the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the LIFC (BA 45) when processing English than the English monolinguals. The results provide insight into the decades-old question about the degree of separation of bilinguals' dual-language representation. The differential activation for bilinguals and monolinguals opens the question as to whether there may possibly be a “neural signature” of bilingualism. Differential activation may further provide a fascinating window into the language processing potential not recruited in monolingual brains and reveal the biological extent of the neural architecture underlying all human language.

Patients with classic galactosemia, an inborn error of metabolism, have speech and language production impairments. Past research primarily focused on speech (motor) problems, but these cannot solely explain the language impairments. Which specific deficits contribute to the impairments in language production is not yet known. Deficits in semantic and syntactic planning are plausible and require further investigation. In the present study, we examined syntactic encoding while patients and matched controls overtly described scenes of moving objects using either separate words (minimal syntactic planning) or sentences (sentence-level syntactic planning). The design of the paradigm also allowed tapping into local noun phrase- and more global sentence-level syntactic planning. Simultaneously, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The patients needed more time to prepare and finish the utterances and made more errors. The patient ERPs had a very similar morphology to that of healthy controls, indicating overall comparable neural processing. Most importantly, the ERPs diverged from those of controls in several functionally informative time windows, ranging from very early (90–150 ms post scene onset) to relatively late (1820–2020 ms post scene onset). These time windows can be associated with different linguistic encoding stages. The ERP results form the first neuroscientific evidence for language production impairments in patients with galactosemia in lexical and syntactic planning stages, i.e., prior to the linguistic output phase. These findings hence shed new light on the language impairments in this disease.

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing.

Recent psycholinguistic models hypothesize that anticipatory processing can speed the response to linguistic input during language comprehension by pre-activating representations necessary for word recognition. We investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms of anticipatory processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) to syntactically anomalous (The thief was caught by for police) and well-formed (e.g., The thief was caught by the police) sentences. One group of participants saw anomalies elicited by the same word in every instance (e.g., for; low-variability stimuli), providing high affordances for predictions about the word-form appearing in the critical position. A second group saw anomalies elicited by seven different prepositions (at, of, on, for, from, over, with; high-variability stimuli) across the study, creating a more difficult prediction task. Syntactic category anomalies enhanced the occipital-temporal N170 component of the ERP, indicating rapid sensitivity – within 200 ms of word-onset – to syntactic anomaly. For low-variability but not the high-variability stimuli, syntactic anomaly also enhanced the earlier occipital-temporal P1 component, around 130 ms after word-onset, indicating that affordances for prediction engendered earlier sensitivity to syntactic anomaly. Independent components analysis revealed three sources within the ERP signal whose functional dynamics were consistent with predictive processing and early responses to syntactic anomaly. Distributed neural source modeling (sLORETA) of these early active sources produced a candidate network for early responses to words during reading in the right posterior occipital, left occipital-temporal, and medial parietal cortex.

Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Replicating prior work, when only syntactic information was available NV-homographs elicited sustained frontal negativity relative to unambiguous words. Semantic constraints eliminated this frontal ambiguity effect. Semantic constraints also reduced N400 amplitudes, but less so for homographs than unambiguous words. Experiment 2 showed that this reduced N400 facilitation was limited to cases in which the semantic context picks out a nondominant meaning, likely reflecting the semantic mismatch between the context and residual, automatic activation of the contextually-inappropriate dominant sense. Overall, the findings suggest that ambiguity resolution in context involves the interplay between multiple neural networks, some involving more automatic semantic processing mechanisms and others involving top-down control mechanisms.

Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical conditions were designed to induce readers to construct the ultimately correct analysis just prior to being garden-pathed by the incorrect analysis. In both experiments, the earliest measures of the garden path effect were not modulated by this manipulation. However, there was significantly less regressive re-reading of the sentence in those conditions in which the correct analysis was likely to have been constructed, then abandoned, at an earlier point. These results suggest that a syntactic analysis that is abandoned in the course of processing a sentence is not lost altogether, and can be re-activated or retrieved from memory. Implications for models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

Recent research suggests that the brain routinely binds together information from gesture and speech. However, most of this research focused on the integration of representational gestures with the semantic content of speech. Much less is known about how other aspects of gesture, such as emphasis, influence the interpretation of the syntactic relations in a spoken message. Here, we investigated whether beat gestures alter which syntactic structure is assigned to ambiguous spoken German sentences. The P600 component of the Event Related Brain Potential indicated that the more complex syntactic structure is easier to process when the speaker emphasizes the subject of a sentence with a beat. Thus, a simple flick of the hand can change our interpretation of who has been doing what to whom in a spoken sentence. We conclude that gestures and speech are integrated systems. Unlike previous studies, which have shown that the brain effortlessly integrates semantic information from gesture and speech, our study is the first to demonstrate that this integration also occurs for syntactic information. Moreover, the effect appears to be gesture-specific and was not found for other stimuli that draw attention to certain parts of speech, including prosodic emphasis, or a moving visual stimulus with the same trajectory as the gesture. This suggests that only visual emphasis produced with a communicative intention in mind (that is, beat gestures) influences language comprehension, but not a simple visual movement lacking such an intention.

The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experience more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the “that” complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing.

Event-related potential (ERP) data in monolingual German speakers have shown that sentential metric expectancy violations elicit a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of an anterior negativity and a posterior positivity (P600). This pattern is comparable to that elicited by syntactic violations. However, proficient French late learners of German do not detect violations of metric expectancy in German. They also show qualitatively and quantitatively different ERP responses to metric and syntactic violations. We followed up the questions whether (1) latter evidence results from a potential pitch cue insensitivity in speech segmentation in French speakers, or (2) if the result is founded in rhythmic language differences. Therefore, we tested Spanish late learners of German, as Spanish, contrary to French, uses pitch as a segmentation cue even though the basic segmentation unit is the same in French and Spanish (i.e., the syllable). We report ERP responses showing that Spanish L2 learners are sensitive to syntactic as well as metric violations in German sentences independent of attention to task in a P600 response. Overall, the behavioral performance resembles that of German native speakers. The current data suggest that Spanish L2 learners are able to extract metric units (trochee) in their L2 (German) even though their basic segmentation unit in Spanish is the syllable. In addition Spanish in contrast to French L2 learners of German are sensitive to syntactic violations indicating a tight link between syntactic and metric competence. This finding emphasizes the relevant role of metric cues not only in L2 prosodic but also in syntactic processing.