In the present study, we aimed to exclude confounding effects of the listed linearization preferences in order to examine the effect of aboutness topic in the prefield of SO and OS sentences. Thus, we held the following factors constant: case of the object (accusative), verb type (active, transitive),

ABT-199 thematic roles of subject (agent) and object (patient) as well as their animacy status (animate). Persisting differences between OS and SO word order we further considered by focusing on comparing contextual effects within the respective word order. Different neurocognitive models of sentence comprehension have been formulated to better understand the nature and time course of online sentence processing (e.g., the extended Augmented Dependency Model (eADM) by Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006a; the auditory sentence processing model by Friederici, 2002). Basically, the architecture of these models is assumed to be hierarchically organized in phases that specify the steps of incremental this website sentence comprehension and correspond with functionally separable networks at the brain level. These processing steps have been linked to specific language-related ERP components. After the prosodic analysis, indexed by a negativity peaking around

100 ms (N100), the model of Friederici (2002) proposes three phases: Phase 1 is an initial phrase-structure-building process of the sentential constituents. In phase 2, morphosyntactic as well as semantic information is integrated (i.e., thematic role assignment), indexed for instance by the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the negativity around 400 ms (N400). Phase 3 is characterized by reanalysis and repair mechanisms as indexed by the positivity around 600 ms (P600) ( Friederici, 2002). Similarly, the eADM proposes three phases of sentence comprehension: In phase 1, the phrase-structure representation is built via template-mapping. In phase 2, the arguments are interpreted with regard to their thematic and prominence relations, indexed by the N400, LAN, the P600 and/or the scrambling negativity

– an ERP component that has been engendered by violations in sequencing arguments according to prominence based hierarchies in languages allowing word order variation (e.g., accusative object precedes subject in the German middlefield ( Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006b, Bornkessel et al., 2002 and Bornkessel Amobarbital et al., 2003) or in Japanese ( Wolff, Schlesewsky, Hirotani, & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2008)). In phase 3 (“generalized mapping”), information structural mechanisms induced by the discourse context, world-knowledge and/or prosody are taken into account and trigger well-formedness evaluation and repair processes, indexed by late positivities (that have been suggested to belong to the P300 component). Hence, in this final phase, sentences are evaluated according to their acceptability with respect to the context environment ( Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006a).