Age of sign language acquisition has lifelong effect on syntactic preferences in sign language users.

Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one's ability to use the first language, and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue, because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early) childhood, but some learn sign language later - a situation that is drastically different from that of spoken language acquisition.

Psycholinguistic mechanisms of classifier processing in sign language.

Nonsigners viewing sign language are sometimes able to guess the meaning of signs by relying on the overt connection between form and meaning, or iconicity (cf. Ortega, Özyürek, & Peeters, 2020; Strickland et al., 2015).

Language Processing as a Precursor to Language Change: Evidence From Icelandic.

One of the main characteristics of human languages is that they are subject to fundamental changes over time. However, because of the long transitional periods involved, the internal dynamics of such changes are typically inaccessible. Here, we present a new approach to examining language change via its connection to language comprehension.

Age of acquisition effects differ across linguistic domains in sign language: EEG evidence.

One of the key questions in the study of human language acquisition is the extent to which the development of neural processing networks for different components of language are modulated by exposure to linguistic stimuli. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue, because prelingually Deaf children who receive access to complex linguistic input later in life provide a window into brain maturation in the absence of language, and subsequent neuroplasticity of neurolinguistic networks during late language learning. While the duration of sensitive periods of acquisition of linguistic subsystems (sound, vocabulary, and syntactic structure) is well established on the basis of L2 acquisition in spoken language, for sign languages, the relative timelines for development of neural processing networks for linguistic sub-domains are unknown.

The Impact of Transitional Movements and Non-Manual Markings on the Disambiguation of Locally Ambiguous Argument Structures in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS).

Previous studies of Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) word-order variations have demonstrated the human processing system's tendency to interpret a sentence-initial (case-) ambiguous argument as the subject of the clause ("subject preference"). The electroencephalogram study motivating the current report revealed earlier reanalysis effects for object-subject compared to subject-object sentences, in particular, before the start of the movement of the agreement marking sign. The effects were bound to time points prior to when both arguments were referenced in space and/or the transitional hand movement prior to producing the disambiguating sign.

Subject preference emerges as cross-modal strategy for linguistic processing.

Research on spoken languages has identified a "subject preference" processing strategy for tackling input that is syntactically ambiguous as to whether a sentence-initial NP is a subject or object. The present study documents that the "subject preference" strategy is also seen in the processing of a sign language, supporting the hypothesis that the "subject"-first strategy is universal and not dependent on the language modality (spoken vs. signed).

The costs of being certain: Brain potential evidence for linguistic preactivation in sentence processing.

Prediction in sentence comprehension is often investigated by measuring the amplitude of the N400 ERP component to words that are more or less predictable from their preceding context. The N400-linked to the activation of word-associated semantic information-is reduced for words that are predictable, indicating that preactivation can lead to facilitated processing. We addressed the question whether there is measurable neural activity related to the preactivation of linguistic information before input confirms or disconfirms this prediction.

Semantic prediction in language comprehension: evidence from brain potentials.

Do people predict specific word-forms during language comprehension? In an Event-Related Potential (ERP) study participants read German sentences with predictable () and unpredictable () verbs. Verbs were either consistent with the expected word-form (/) or inconsistent and therefore led to ungrammaticality (*/*). ERPs within the N400 time-window were modulated by predictability but not by the surface-form of the verbs, suggesting that no exact word-forms were predicted.

Marking the counterfactual: ERP evidence for pragmatic processing of German subjunctives.

Counterfactual conditionals are frequently used in language to express potentially valid reasoning from factually false suppositions. Counterfactuals provide two pieces of information: their literal meaning expresses a suppositional dependency between an antecedent (If the dice had been rigged…) and a consequent (… then the game would have been unfair). Their second, backgrounded meaning refers to the opposite state of affairs and suggests that, in fact, the dice were not rigged and the game was fair.

Oscillatory brain activity in vegetative and minimally conscious state during a sentence comprehension task.

Patients with altered states of consciousness continue to constitute a major challenge in terms of clinical assessment, treatment and daily management. Furthermore, the exploration of brain function in severely brain-damaged patients represents a unique lesional approach to the scientific study of consciousness. Electroencephalography is one means of identifying covert behaviour in the absence of motor activity in these critically ill patients.

Think globally: cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension.

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g.

The N400 as a correlate of interpretively relevant linguistic rules: evidence from Hindi.

Classical views on the electrophysiology of language assume that different event-related potential (ERP) components index distinct linguistic subdomains. Hence, left-anterior negativities are often viewed as correlates of rule-based linguistic knowledge, whereas centro-parietal negativities (N400s) are taken to reflect (non-rule-based) semantic memory or aspects of lexical-semantic predictability. The present ERP study of case marking in Hindi challenges this clear-cut dichotomy.

To predict or not to predict: influences of task and strategy on the processing of semantic relations.

We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical-semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related to predictability (which differ as a function of the experimental environment). To this end, we conducted three ERP studies contrasting the processing of antonym relations (black-white) with that of related (black-yellow) and unrelated (black-nice) word pairs.

Differential effects of saliency: an event-related brain potential study.

We present event-related brain potential evidence from language comprehension that the N400-modulation during noun-phrase integration is a function of the type of referential dependency that is established (identity versus inference) and the saliency (in the following understood as the sum of factors that influence the degree of accessibility of an entity in the mental model) of the information unit that serves as an anchor for the dependency. Identity relations revealed a reduced N400 compared to inferential relations, confirming previous findings. More importantly, the investigation provides novel findings concerning the effect of saliency on noun-phrase integration: identity relations did not reveal a difference in the N400 as a function of the saliency manipulation.

When case meets agreement: event-related potential effects for morphology-based conflict resolution in human language comprehension.

We present event-related potential evidence from language comprehension that processing conflicts arising from the same linguistic domain and appearing within the same time range do not interact when they draw upon distinct underlying neural populations. Thus, a combined violation of two morphosyntactic information types, number-agreement and case, engendered a LAN/N400-P600 pattern, while the corresponding single violations are associated with LAN-P600 and N400-P600 responses, respectively. The absence of an interaction between the two negativities indicates that neuronal resource sharing does not result from a similarity of function, but rather requires an overlap of the underlying neuronal populations.

Fractionating language comprehension via frequency characteristics of the human EEG.

We present a new analysis technique for EEG research on language comprehension, which dissociates superficially indistinguishable event-related potential (ERP) components. A frequency-based analysis differentiated between two apparently identical but functionally distinct N400 effects in terms of activity in separable frequency bands, and whether the activity stemmed from increased power or phase locking. Whereas linguistic problem detection is associated with theta band activity (approximately 3.