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The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-“deaf” for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

The paper reports the results of a learnability experiment with German speakers, investigating the role of universal phonotactic constraints and language use in language processing. Making use of an artificial language paradigm, participants learned nonce words with existent and non-existent German final consonant clusters adhering to or violating sonority sequencing principles postulated for consonant clusters. Behavioural data and event-related brain potentials in response to these cluster properties were obtained twice, before and after learning word-picture-pairs. The results show (1) that learning and processing of final consonant clusters is facilitated by adherence to the sonority hierarchy, and (2) that actual existence of well- and ill-formed consonant clusters aids processing mechanisms. Thus, both implicit knowledge of universal phonotactic principles and frequency-based factors are demonstrated to play a role in the online-processing of words