Here we report findings from a cross-sectional study of morphosyntactic processing in native German speakers and native English speakers enrolled in college-level German courses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants read sentences that were either well-formed or violated German subject–verb agreement. Results showed that grammatical violations elicited large P600 effects in the native Germans and learners enrolled in third-year courses. Grand mean waveforms for learners enrolled in first-year courses showed a biphasic N400–P600 response. However, subsequent correlation analyses revealed that most individuals showed either an N400 or a P600, but not both, and that brain response type was associated with behavioral measures of grammatical sensitivity. These results support models of second language acquisition which implicate qualitative changes in the neural substrates of second language grammar processing associated with learning. Importantly, we show that new insights into L2 learning result when the cross-subject variability is treated as a source of evidence rather than a source of noise.

Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as a message-level process involving the representation of the subject NP's number features, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval processes. We suggest that mechanisms responsible for attraction during language comprehension are a subset of those involved in language production.

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Although it is widely known that high-pass filters can reduce the amplitude of slow ERP components, these filters can also introduce artifactual peaks that lead to incorrect conclusions. To demonstrate this and provide evidence about optimal filter settings, we recorded ERPs in a typical language processing paradigm involving syntactic and semantic violations. Unfiltered results showed standard N400 and P600 effects in the semantic and syntactic violation conditions, respectively. However, high-pass filters with cutoffs at 0.3 Hz and above produced artifactual effects of opposite polarity before the true effect. That is, excessive high-pass filtering introduced a significant N400 effect preceding the P600 in the syntactic condition, and a significant P2 effect preceding the N400 in the semantic condition. Thus, inappropriate use of high-pass filters can lead to false conclusions about which components are influenced by a given manipulation. The present results also lead to practical recommendations for high-pass filter settings that maximize statistical power while minimizing filtering artifacts.

In this article we review several studies investigating the neural correlates of secondlanguage (L2) grammatical learning in the context of novice adult learners progressing through their first year of L2 classroom instruction. The primary goal of these studies was to determine how and when learners incorporate L2 knowledge into their online language processing system. We show that at least some learners progress through discrete stages of grammatical learning during the first year of instruction. These stages are robust across languages, experimental tasks, and levels of language (lexical vs. sentential) and indicate that there is an intermediate stage of learning between no L2 grammatical knowledge and grammaticalization. We also show that although learners' brain responses are quite variable, this variability is highly systematic and can be used to identify meaningful subgroups of learners.