BRIEF REPORT Syntactic anomaly elicits a lexico-semantic (N400) ERP effect in the second language but not the first

Recent brain potential research into first versus second language (L1 vs. L2) processing revealed striking responses to morphosyntactic features absent in the mother tongue. The aim of the present study was to establish whether the presence of comparable morphosyntactic features in L1 leads to more similar electrophysiological L1 and L2 profiles. ERPs were acquired while German–English bilinguals and native speakers of English read sentences. Some sentences were meaningful and well formed, whereas others contained morphosyntactic or semantic violations in the final word. In addition to the expected P600 component, morphosyntactic violations in L2 but not L1 led to an enhanced N400. This effect may suggest either that resolution of morphosyntactic anomalies in L2 relies on the lexico-semantic system or that the weaker/slower morphological mechanisms in L2 lead to greater sentence wrap-up difficulties known to result in N400 enhancement. Descriptors: Bilingualism, ERP, Syntactic violations, N400 The sensitivity of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to syn-tactic and semantic processes in the native language (L1) makes them appealing for examining the second language (L2). In L1, manipulations of semantic expectancy invariably elicit the N400 component (Kutas & Hillyard, 1984), whereas syntactic viola-tions elicit two kinds of components: (typically left-lateralized) anterior negativities (LAN; Münte, Heinze, & Mangun, 1993), and the P600 component, or Syntactic Positive Shift (Hagoort