e., an enhanced P200 for novel-topic > topic-shift > topic-continuity; see also Hung & Schumacher (2014)). They interpreted the P200 –which was reduced for processing similar graphical forms– as an early perceptual mismatch response. This is in line with our interpretation of the present finding

in terms of an early perceptual repetition effect in the topic condition. Some ERP studies examining word order variation in German main clauses (i.e., prefield) without a preceding context demonstrated processing difficulties in terms of an enhanced LAN for OS compared to SO at the first DP (e.g., Matzke et al., 2002 and Rösler VX-809 cost et al., 1998), whereas other studies did not report such an effect of canonicity (e.g., Frisch et al., 2002 and Knoeferle et al., 2007). For the German middlefield, robust processing difficulties in form of the scrambling negativity for OS vs. SO are reported even if preceded by context information (e.g., Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006b and Bornkessel et al., 2003). As mentioned above, we did not focus on the direct comparison of the two word orders for the following reasons: First, SO is the canonical and more frequent word order in German; any differences could hence be confounded

by those effects. Second, grammatical and thematic role coincided in our material. Thus, we would not only compare word order but also the order of thematic roles. Therefore, we prefer to interpret our context effects within each word order to assure we compare the same target sentences. However, the ERPs click here in our study indicate that word order immediately interacted with the preceding context during incremental sentence processing, as reflected by the late positivity at DP1 – the position that immediately followed the context question and revealed the crucial case marking of subject/object and the thematic role. Hence, it seems that similar to Schumacher and Hung (2012) no processing difficulties for OS vs. SO in terms of a negative deflection at the sentence-initial position of German main clauses was elicited – if embedded in a strong licensing context. At both subsequent sentence positions (i.e., verb,

DP2) a significant word order effect was found. OS (vs. SO) sentences elicited an early positivity (100–300 ms) as well as a left Non-specific serine/threonine protein kinase central negativity 300–500 ms after the finite verb and a frontally distributed positivity 500–700 ms after the DP2. Similar word order effects on ERPs at subsequent sentence positions have been reported in other studies (e.g., a negativity around 350–550 ms relative to verb onset (Wolff et al., 2008); a positivity (400–700 ms) at DP2 (Fiebach, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2002)). In line with these studies, we interpret the word order effects in our study as reflecting general processing costs for OS compared to SO sentences. In line with recent studies using either offline (e.g., Meng et al., 1999 and Weskott et al., 2011) or online methods (e.g., Bornkessel et al.