Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

In this response to Demestre's comment, we first discuss the terms "legal" and "prohibited," applied to syntactic structures, stressing that there are boundaries in which the legality of certain constructions appears imprecise and is a matter of discussion. This coalesces with actual and daily use by native speakers of a language, who can normally…

The current study investigated whether Russian--English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means "mouth" in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the…

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs.…

Investigating the neuronal network underlying language processing may contribute to a better understanding of how the brain masters this complex cognitive function with surprising ease and how language is acquired at a fast pace in infancy. Modern neuroimaging methods permit to visualize the evolvement and the function of the language network. The…

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Event-related potentials were recorded to substantiate the claim of a distinct psycholinguistic status of (a) pronouns vs. proper names and (b) ellipses vs. proper names. In two studies 41 students read sentences in which the number of intervening words between the anaphor and its antecedent was either small or large. Comparing the far with the…