e., focus on subject or object) during processing of sentences with varying word order from previous studies (e.g., Bornkessel et al., 2003 and Meng et al., 1999). Thus, absence of an N400 modulation in our study might be due to the fact that both characters of the scene were previously

mentioned in the lead-in context, and thus equally expected and accessible in the mental model. This is in line with Burkhardt and Roehm (2007), who argue that both entities within a coordinated noun phrase –in our experimental design the two animals in the lead-in (e.g., the owl and the hedgehog)– evoke the same representational status in terms of accessibility or saliency selleck screening library in the mental model. In the framework of the SDM, our design was effective in the modulation of costs for updating the current discourse model (late positivity, see above) but not for expectancy-based discourse linking processes (N400). Notably, in the topic condition, the topic of the context-question (e.g., What about the owl?) was directly repeated at the sentence initial position

of the target sentence (SO and OS sentences), whereas such a repetition was not present in the target sentence following the neutral context (e.g., What exactly is going on?). Accordingly, the context type in our study revealed a EPZ015666 molecular weight broadly distributed early positive peak time-locked to the onset of the target sentence independent of its word order. As the topic context induced a reduction of this early positivity relative to the neutral context, we suggest that this context effect might be confounded with basic processes of information encoding due to word repetition in one but not the other context. The early positivity we found showed about a similar peak and latency pattern as the positivity around

200 ms (c.f., P200) for which mixed results regarding its functional nature are reported in dependence on the experimental paradigm (e.g., Coulson et al., 2005, Federmeier and Kutas, 2001 and Friedrich and Kotz, 2007). As early modulations of ERPs, such as the P200, have commonly been associated with processes of basic information encoding (for visual stimuli see for instance Dunn et al., 1998, Evans and Federmeier, 2007 and Luck and Hillyard, 1994), we propose an interpretation of the reduced early positivity for repeated words in the topic condition in terms of a word repetition effect. Note that so far contradictory results have been reported with regard to amplitude and latency of ERPs elicited by word repetition: On the one hand side, some studies did not find a reduced but instead an enhanced early positivity for repeated words (see e.g., van Petten, Kutas, Kluender, Mitchiner, & McIsaac, 1991). However, in line with our data, a reduced early positivity for repeated words was found in word lists (e.g., Nagy and Rugg, 1989 and Rugg, 1985).