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Three experiments concerning the processing of syntactic and semantic violations were conducted. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed that semantic violations elicited an N400 response, whereas syntactic violations elicited two early negativities (150 and 350 ms) and a P600 response. No interaction between the semantic and early syntactic ERP effects was found. Sentence complexity and violation probability (25% vs. 75%) affected only the P600 and not the early negativities. The probability effect was taken as evidence that the P600 resembles the P3b. The temporal order of word processing in a sentence as suggested by the data was such that a more automatic syntactic analysis was performed (earlier syntactic-related negativities) in parallel with a semantic analysis (N400), after which a syntactic reanalysis was performed (P600). A reanalysis interpretation of the P600 could explain why the extent of the reanalysis differed with syntactic complexity and probability of ungrammaticality.

. Second language processing: when are first and second languages processed similarly?.

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International audienceIn this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch coming from a historically similar system. The Romance languages have grammatical gender; however, the system is not congruent to the Dutch system. English does not have grammatical gender (although semantic gender is marked in the pronoun system). Experiment 1, a simple gender assignment task, showed that all L2 participants tested could assign the correct gender to Dutch nouns (all L2 groups performing on average above 80%), although having gender in the L1 did correlate with higher accuracy, particularly when the gender systems were very similar. Effects of noun familiarity and a default gender strategy were found for all participants. In Experiment 2 agreement between the noun and the relative pronoun was investigated. In this task a distinct performance hierarchy was found with the German group performing the best (though significantly worse than native speakers), the Romance group performing well above chance (though not as well as the German group), and the English group performing at chance. These results show that L2 acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the morphological similarity of gender marking in the L1 and L2 than by the presence of abstract syntactic gender features in the L1

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