While it may become necessary to give up on the idea of a specific EEG index of structural or combinatorial processing, a reliable measure for these fundamental mechanisms

and how they contribute to language processing may be won instead. Parts of the research reported here were supported by the German Research Foundation (BO 2471/3-2), the LOEWE programme of the German state of Hesse and by the University of Mainz as part of the research initiative “Pro Geisteswissenschaften”. We would like to thank Karin Hollerbach, Miriam Burk, Alexander Dröge and Phillip Alday for help with the stimulus materials and Brita Rietdorf for the data acquisition. We are also grateful to Herman Kolk and several anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on previous versions of the manuscript. “
“In everyday communication, we typically link our utterances to the discourse environment of the interlocutor GSK126 in order to efficiently achieve our communicative objectives. Besides other factors, the speaker considers background information Antidiabetic Compound Library supplier and feedback of the listener. Linguistic (e.g., information structure, stress) as well as extra-linguistic features (e.g., gestures, eye-gaze) are dynamically used to clarify what the utterance is about and ultimately guide the cooperative listener to the communicative intention of the speaker. It has been proposed that the listener structurally represents all relevant aspects of information

(e.g., participants, events) delivered via language and HSP90 perception within a mental model in which further incoming discourse information is integrated (e.g., Cowles, 2003 and Johnson-Laird, 1980). Information structure (cf. information packaging) is concerned with how information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer ( Chafe, 1976). In this regard the idea of efficient communication was defined by Clark and Haviland (1977) as: “The speaker tries, to the best of his ability, to make the structure of his utterances

congruent with his knowledge of the listener‘s mental world” (p. 4). Ordering of information at the sentence-level is thought to be influenced by information structural concepts, such as topic-comment, given-new, or focus-background (e.g., Büring, 2007, Halliday, 1967, Krifka, 2008 and Lenerz, 1977). However, these information structural concepts lack a uniform definition and depend on the field of research and respective theoretical framework. For the purposes of our study, we use the following definitions: The TOPIC of a sentence is typically understood as the information that the speaker intends to increase the listener’s knowledge ( Gundel, 1985). Hence, topic is defined as what the sentence is about; COMMENT is what is said about the topic ( Gundel, 1988 and Reinhart, 1981; see Section 1.4 for a more detailed definition of topic). GIVEN INFORMATION constitutes information the speaker expects to be already known by the listener (e.g.