To detect blinks and vertical eye movements, an electrooculogram (EOG) was monitored by one electrode under and one electrode above the right eye. The ground electrode was placed at FP1. EEG data

were acquired with a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Impedances were kept below 5 kOhm. The left mastoid served as the reference electrode online, but the recording was re-referenced to this website bilateral mastoids offline. For ERP data analysis, Brain Vision Analyzer software (version 2.0.2; Brain Products, Gilching, Germany) was used. EEG raw data were filtered by applying the Butterworth zero phase filter (low cutoff: 0.3 Hz; high cutoff: 70 Hz; slope: 12 dB/oct) to exclude slow signal drifts and muscle artifacts, and a notch filter of 50 Hz. Artifacts caused by vertical eye movements were corrected by the algorithm of Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1983). An automatic artifact rejection was used to reject blinks and drifts in the time window of −200 to 1500 ms relative to the onset of the critical stimuli in the target sentence: first determiner phrase (DP1), verb (V) and second determiner phrase (DP2) (rejection criteria: max.

voltage step of 30 μV/ms, max. 200 μV difference of values in interval, lowest activity of 0.5 μV in intervals). Relative to the onset of DP1, V, and DP2, on average 5.71% of trials were rejected with an equal distribution across onsets of critical stimuli and experimental conditions [F(2, 36), p > .1]. ERPs were averaged for each participant and each condition within a 1500 ms time window time-locked to the onset of the critical stimuli with a 200 ms pre-stimulus onset baseline. Based on visual inspection of the ERPs and according to the literature on selleck screening library language-related ERP components (i.e., P200, N400, late positivity), mean amplitude values of the ERPs per condition were

statistically analyzed in the time windows 100–300 ms (P200), 300–500 ms (N400) and 500–700 ms 4-Aminobutyrate aminotransferase (late positivity). The following nine regions of interest (ROIs) were computed via mean amplitudes of the three corresponding electrodes: left frontal (F7, F5, F3), left fronto-central (FC3, C5, C3), left centro-parietal (CP5, P3, P7), right frontal (F8, F6, F4), right fronto-central (FC4, C6, C4), right centro-parietal (CP6, P4, P8), frontal-midline (FPz, AFz, Fz), central midline (FCz, Cz, CPz), parietal midline (Pz, POz, Oz). The statistical ERP analysis followed a hierarchical schema (e.g., Bornkessel et al., 2003 and Rossi et al., 2011) using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 21.0). Firstly, a fully crossed repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the factors CONTEXT TYPE (TOPIC, NEUTRAL), WORD ORDER (SO, OS), and ROI (nine levels) was computed separately for the three time windows post onset DP1, V, and DP2. We applied the correction of Greenhouse and Geisser (1959) and report the corrected F- and p-values but with the original degrees of freedom. Only statistically significant (p ⩽ .05) and marginally significant (p ⩽ .