One main incentive for supplying hearing impaired children with a cochlear implant is the prospect of oral language acquisition. Only scarce knowledge exists, however, of what congenitally deaf children actually perceive when receiving their first auditory input, and specifically what speech-relevant features they are able to extract from the new modality. We therefore presented congenitally deaf infants and young children implanted before the age of 4 years with an oddball paradigm of long and short vowel variants of the syllable /ba/. We measured the EEG in regular intervals to study their discriminative ability starting with the first activation of the implant up to 8 months later. We were thus able to time-track the emerging ability to differentiate one of the most basic linguistic features that bears semantic differentiation and helps in word segmentation, namely, vowel length. Results show that already 2 months after the first auditory input, but not directly after implant activation, these early implanted children differentiate between long and short syllables. Surprisingly, after only 4 months of hearing experience, the ERPs have reached the same properties as those of the normal hearing control group, demonstrating the plasticity of the brain with respect to the new modality. We thus show that a simple but linguistically highly relevant feature such as vowel length reaches age-appropriate electrophysiological levels as fast as 4 months after the first acoustic stimulation, providing an important basis for further language acquisition.

The present study investigated the role of proficiency in late second-language (L2) processing using comparable stimuli in German and Italian. Both sets of stimuli consisted of simple active sentences including a word category violation, a morphosyntactic agreement violation, or a combination of the two. Four experiments were conducted to study high- and low-proficiency L2 learners of German as well as high- and low-proficiency L2 learners of Italian. High-proficiency L2 learners in both languages showed the same event-related potential (ERP) components as native speakers for all syntactic violations. For the word category violation, they displayed an early anterior negativity (ELAN), an additional negativity reflecting reference-related processes, and a late P600 evidencing processes of reanalysis. For the processing of the morphosyntactic error, an anterior negativity (LAN) and a P600 were observed, whereas for the combined violation, the same ERP components were found as in the pure category violation. In high-proficiency L2 learners, the timing of the processing steps was equivalent to that of native speakers, although some amplitude differences were present. Low-proficiency L2 learners, however, showed qualitative differences in the agreement violation characterized by the absence of the LAN and quantitative differences reflected in a delayed P600 in every violation condition. These findings emphasize that with a high proficiency, late L2 learners can indeed show native-like neural responses with the timing approximating that of native speakers. This challenges the idea that there are fundamental differences in language processing in the brain between natives and late L2 learners.

This study reports the results of two behavioral and two event-related brain potential experiments examining the processing of inflected words in second-language (L2) learners with Russian as their native language. Two different subsystems of German inflection were studied, participial inflection and noun plurals. For participial forms, L2 learners were found to widely generalize the -t suffixation rule in a nonce-word elicitation task, and in the event-related brain potential experiment, they showed an anterior negativity followed by a P600-both results resembling previous findings from native speakers of German on the same materials. For plural formation, the L2 learners displayed different preference patterns for regular and irregular forms in an off-line plural judgment task. Regular and irregular plural forms also differed clearly with regard to their brain responses. Whereas overapplications of the -s plural rule produced a P600 component, overapplications of irregular patterns elicited an N400. In contrast to native speakers of German, however, the L2 learners did not show an anterior negativity for -s plural overapplications. Taken together, the results show clear dissociations between regular and irregular inflection for both morphological subsystems. We argue that the two processing routes posited by dual-mechanism models of inflection (lexical storage and morphological decomposition) are also employed by L2 learners.

Several event-related potential (ERP) studies in second language (L2) processing have revealed a differential vulnerability of syntax-related ERP effects in contrast to purely semantic ERP effects. However, it is still debated to what extent a potential critical period for L2 acquisition, as opposed to the attained proficiency level in the L2, contributes to the pattern of results reported in previous ERP studies. We studied L2 processing within the model of a miniature version of a natural language, namely Japanese, specifically constructed to assure high proficiency of the learners. In an auditory ERP experiment, we investigated sentence processing of the “Mini-Japanese” in Japanese native speakers and German volunteers before and after training. By making use of three different types of violation, namely, word category, case, and classifier violations, native and nonnative ERP patterns were compared. The three types of violation elicited three characteristic ERP patterns in Japanese native speakers. The word category violation elicited an anteriorly focused, broadly distributed early negativity followed by a P600, whereas the case violation evoked a P600 which was preceded by an N400. The classifier violation led solely to a late left distributed negativity with an anterior focus. Although the P600 was similar for Japanese natives and learners, the N400 and the anterior negativities were not present in the learner group. The differences across groups suggest deviant neural processes in on-line syntactic and thematic processing in the L2 learners despite high behavioral skills.

Four experiments systematically investigating the brain's response to the perception of sentences containing differing amounts of linguistic information are presented. Spoken language generally provides various levels of information for the interpretation of the incoming speech stream. Here, we focus on the processing of prosodic phrasing, especially on its interplay with phonemic, semantic, and syntactic information. An event-related brain potential (ERP) paradigm was chosen to record the on-line responses to the processing of sentences containing major prosodic boundaries. For the perception of these prosodic boundaries, the so-called closure positive shift (CPS) has been manifested as a reliable and replicable ERP component. It has mainly been shown to correlate to major intonational phrasing in spoken language. However, to define this component as exclusively relying on the prosodic information in the speech stream, it is necessary to systematically reduce the linguistic content of the stimulus material. This was done by creating quasi-natural sentence material with decreasing semantic, syntactic, and phonemic information (i.e., jabberwocky sentences, in which all content words were replaced by meaningless words; pseudoword sentences, in which all function and all content words are replaced by meaningless words; and delexicalized sentences, hummed intonation contour of a sentence removing all segmental content). The finding that a CPS was identified in all sentence types in correlation to the perception of their major intonational boundaries clearly indicates that this effect is driven purely by prosody.

Developmental aspects of language comprehension were investigated using event-related brain potentials. Children between the ages of 6 and 13 listened to passive sentences that were correct, semantically incorrect, or syntactically incorrect, and data in each condition were compared with those of adults. For semantic violations, adults demonstrated a negativity (N400), as did children, but the latency decreased with age. For syntactic violations, adults displayed an early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and a late centro-parietal positivity (P600). A syntactic negativity and a late positivity were also present for children between 7 and 13 years, again with latency decreasing with age. Six-year-olds, in contrast, did not demonstrate an ELAN effect, but a late, reduced P600 pattern for the syntactic violation condition. In the early time window, the 6-year-olds displayed a widely distributed negativity that was larger for the correct than for the syntactically incorrect condition. These data indicate that the neurophysiological basis for semantic processes during auditory sentence comprehension does not change dramatically between early childhood and adulthood. Syntactic processes for passive sentences appear to differ between early and late childhood, at least with respect to those processes reflected in the ELAN component. As there is evidence that the ELAN reflects highly automatic structure building processes, we conclude that these processes are not yet established at age 7, but gradually develop toward adult-like processing during late childhood.

Numerous studies investigated physiological correlates of the processing of musical information in adults. How these correlates develop during childhood is poorly understood. In the present study, we measured event-related electric brain potentials elicited in 5and 9-year-old children while they listened to (major–minor tonal) music. Stimuli were chord sequences, infrequently containing harmonically inappropriate chords. Our results demonstrate that the degree of (in) appropriateness of the chords modified the brain responses in both groups according to music-theoretical principles. This suggests that already 5-year-old children process music according to a well-established cognitive representation of the major–minor tonal system and according to music-syntactic regularities. Moreover, we show that, in contrast to adults, an early negative brain response was left predominant in boys, whereas it was bilateral in girls, indicating a gender difference in children processing music, and revealing that children process music with a hemispheric weighting different from that of adults. Because children process, in contrast to adults, music in the same hemispheres as they process language, results indicate that children process music and language more similarly than adults. This finding might support the notion of a common origin of music and language in the human brain, and concurs with findings that demonstrate the importance of musical features of speech for the acquisition of language.

In this study we examined the properties of the processes involved in the structural analysis of sentences using event-related brain potential measures (ERP). Previous research had shown two ERP components to correlate with phrase structure violations: an early left anterior negativity (ELAN), which is assumed to reflect first-pass parsing processes, and a late parietally distributed positivity (P600), assumed to reflect second-pass parsing processes. We hypothesized that the first-pass parsing processes are highly automatic, whereas second-pass parsing processes are more controlled. To test this hypothesis we varied the proportion of correct sentences and sentences containing phrase structure violations with incorrect sentences being either of a low (20% violation) or a high (80% violation) proportion. Results showed that the early left anterior negativity was elicited and equally pronounced under both proportion conditions. By contrast, the late positivity was elicited for a low proportion of incorrect sentences only. This data pattern suggests that first-pass parsing processes are automatic, whereas second-pass parsing processes are under participants' strategic control.

The objective of the present study was to delineate brain-electrical correlates of semantic and syntactic integration processes during language comprehension. Twenty-eight subjects were engaged in a lexical decision task. The target item (a legal word or a pseudo word) was always preceded by a prime consisting of a sentence fragment that provided a particular context. With respect to the prime a word target could be either a correct completion, a violation of a semantic selection restriction, or a violation of a syntactic subcategorization rule. An N400-like wave was elicited by both types of deviations. Syntactic anomalies evoked a negative shift predominantly over the anterior scalp with a preponderance over the left hemisphere, while semantic anomalies were accompanied by a much more widespread negativity with the maximum over posterior temporal areas. The amplitude of the semantic vie lation effect was found to be related to the strength of the priming constraints. The topographic difference is consistent with the idea that syntactic and semantic aspects of comprehension are handled by different neural subsystems.