Spoken language, in contrast to written text, provides prosodic information such as rhythm, pauses, accents, amplitude and pitch variations. However, little is known about when and how these features are used by the listener to interpret the speech signal. Here we use event-related brain potentials (ERP) to demonstrate that intonational phrasing guides the initial analysis of sentence structure. Our finding of a positive shift in the ERP at intonational phrase boundaries suggests a specific on-line brain response to prosodic processing. Additional ERP components indicate that a false prosodic boundary is sufficient to mislead the listener's sentence processor. Thus, the application of ERP measures is a promising approach for revealing the time course and neural basis of prosodic information processing.

Adult second language learning seems to be more difficult and less efficient than first language acquisition during childhood. By using event-related brain potentials, we show that adults who learned a miniature artificial language display a similar real-time pattern of brain activation when processing this language as native speakers do when processing natural languages. Participants trained in the artificial language showed two event-related brain potential components taken to reflect early automatic and late controlled syntactic processes, whereas untrained participants did not. This result challenges the common view that late second language learners process language in a principally different way from native speakers. Our findings demonstrate that a small system of grammatical rules can be syntactically instantiated by the adult speaker in a way that strongly resembles native-speaker sentence processing.

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 artificial language paradigm to examine longitudinally whether explicit training (that approximates traditional grammar-focused classroom settings) and implicit training (that approximates immersion settings) differentially affect neural (electrophysiological) and behavioral (performance) measures of syntactic processing. Results showed that performance of explicitly and implicitly trained groups did not differ at either low or high proficiency. In contrast, electrophysiological (ERP) measures revealed striking differences between the groups’ neural activity at both proficiency levels in response to syntactic violations. Implicit training yielded an N400 at low proficiency, whereas at high proficiency, it elicited a pattern typical of native speakers: an anterior negativity followed by a P600 accompanied by a late anterior negativity. Explicit training, by contrast, yielded no significant effects at low proficiency and only an anterior positivity followed by a P600 at high proficiency. Although the P600 is reminiscent of native-like processing, this response pattern as a whole is not. Thus, only implicit training led to an electrophysiological signature typical of native speakers. Overall, the results suggest that adult foreign language learners can come to rely on native-like language brain mechanisms, but that the conditions under which the language is learned may be crucial in attaining this goal.

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, in contrast to previous suggestions, there is little evidence for a strict critical period in the domain of late acquired second language (L2) morphosyntax. As illustrated by data from our lab and others, proficiency rather than AoA seems to predict brain activity patterns in L2 processing, including native-like activity at very high levels of proficiency. Further, a strict distinction between linguistic structures that late L2 learners can vs. cannot learn to process in a native-like manner (Clahsen and Felser, 2006a; 2006b) may not be warranted. Instead, morphosyntactic real-time processing in general seems to undergo dramatic, but systematic, changes with increasing proficiency levels. We describe the general dynamics of these changes (and the corresponding ERP components) and discuss how ERP research can advance our current understanding of SLA in general.

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 artificial language under either explicit (classroomlike) or implicit (immersionlike) training conditions. In each group, both noun-article and noun-adjective gender agreement processing were examined behaviorally and with ERPs at both low and higher levels of proficiency. Results showed that the two groups learned the language to similar levels of proficiency but showed somewhat different ERP patterns. At low proficiency, both types of agreement violations (adjective, article) yielded N400s, but only for the group with implicit training. Additionally, noun-adjective agreement elicited a late N400 in the explicit group at low proficiency. At higher levels of proficiency, nounadjective agreement violations elicited N400s for both the explicit and implicit groups, whereas noun-article agreement violations elicited P600s for both groups. The results suggest that interactions among linguistic structure, proficiency level, and type of training need to be considered when examining the development of aspects of inflectional morphology in L2 acquisition. Keywordssecond language acquisition; event-related potentials; language processing; explicit; implicit; agreement Aspects of inflectional morphology, including grammatical gender agreement in noun phrases (NPs), seem to be particularly difficult for late second language (L2) learners to acquire (Montrul, 2004; Montrul, Foote, Perpiñán, Thornhill, & Vidal, 2008;White, 2003).Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kara Morgan-Short, Departments of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese and Psychology, 1706 UH MC 315, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607. Internet: karams@uic.edu; Michael T. Ullman, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. Internet: michael@georgetown.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptLang Learn. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 February 24.Published in final edited form as:Lang Learn. 2010 March ; 60(1): 154-193. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00554.x. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptEven for learners at advanced levels of proficiency, errors in gender agreement appear to persist (Dewaele & Veronique, 2001;Franceschina, 2005). Although this issue has been addressed from multiple perspectives (Arteaga, Herschensohn, & Gess, 2003;Bartning, 2000;Benati, 2005;De Jong, 2005;Dewaele & Veronique, 2001;Franceschina, 2005;Gass & Alvarez Torres, 2005;Hawkins & Chan, 1997;Keating, 2009;Montrul, 2004;Montrul et al., 2008;White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-Macgregor, & Leung, 2004), neurocognitive research has only begun to consider the development, representation, and processing of L2 grammatical gender ...

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Abstract■ 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 either in line or in conflict with the actual syntactic structure. Sentences with incongruent boundaries were accepted less than those with missing boundaries and elicited a stronger on-line brain response in ERPs (N400/P600 components). Our results support the notion that mentally deleting an overt prosodic boundary is more costly than postulating a new one and extend previous findings, suggesting an immediate role of prosody in sentence comprehension. Importantly, our study also provides new details on the profile and temporal dynamics of the closure positive shift (CPS), an ERP component assumed to reflect prosodic phrasing in speech and music in real time. We show that the CPS is reliably elicited at the onset of prosodic boundaries in English sentences and is preceded by negative components. Its early onset distinguishes the speech CPS in adults both from prosodic ERP correlates in infants and from the "music CPS" previously reported for trained musicians. ■

Event-related potentials were used to study how parsing of German relative clauses is influenced by semantic information, Subjects read well-formed sentences containing either a subject or an object relative clause and answered questions concerning the thematic roles expressed in those sentences. Half of the sentences contained past participles that on grounds of semantic plausibility biased either a subject or an object relative reading; the other half contained past participles that provided no semantic information favoring either reading. The past participle elicited an N400 component, larger in amplitude for neutral than for semantically biased verbs, but this occurred only in the case of subject relative clauses. More specific effects were obtained only for a subgroup of subjects, when these were grouped into fast and slow comprehenders on the basis of their questionanswering reaction times. Fast comprehenders showed larger N400 amplitudes for neutral than for semantically biased past participles in general and larger N400s for the latter when there was a bias for an object relative reading as opposed to a subject relative reading. Syntactic ambiguity resolution, indicated by an auxiliary in sentence final position, was associated in this subgroup with a positive component (P345), larger in amplitude for auxiliaries indicating an object relative reading than for those indicating a subject relative reading. The latter component was independent of semantically biasing information given by a preceding past participle. Implications of these findings for models of language comprehension are considered.Most of the models of language comprehension assume that in forming a representation of a linguistic input the reader or listener exploits grammatical as well as pragmatic knowledge. Although there is general agreement that language comprehension involves the integration of information from lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic sources, there is an ongoing debate with respect to the nature and the timing ofthe mental processes involved in language comprehension (e.g., Flores d' Arcais, 1990;Frazier, 1987a). One major issue in psycholinguistic research is the stage of processing at which syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information are made available This work was supported by grants from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Fr 519/12-2). We wish to thank Erdmut Pfeifer for his support in software production for the present experiment. We are grateful to Lee Osterhout and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft ofthis article and to Douglas Saddy for fruitful discussions. Requests for reprints can be sent to A. Mecklinger,