Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. [Kolk et al., 2003] and [Kuperberg et al., 2003]), but a biphasic N400--late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky…