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Updated: Aug 30, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Contextual information modulates initial processes of syntactic integration: the role of inter- versus
Ina Bornkessel1, Matthias Schlesewsky, Angela D Friederici
1Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. bornke@cns.mpg.de
Abstract:
The authors demonstrate that intersentential context may influence syntactic integration processes during online sentence comprehension, although this influence appears to be restricted to cases in which a contextual requirement must be fulfilled. By applying event-related brain potentials to the processing of clause-medial word order variations in German, the authors show that the local processing difficulty (a negativity from 300 to 450 ms) observed for object-initial sentences in a neutral context is also obtained in a (behaviorally) facilitating context in which the object is contextually given. By contrast, the processing pattern for a focused (questioned) initial object does not differ from that for a focused subject: both elicit a parietal positivity (280-480 ms) post-onset of the focused phrase. The authors interpret this early positivity as a general marker of focus integration, a process that appears to briefly supersede sentence-internal requirements.
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