e., increased frequency of OS if the object was given in a previous context but the subject was discourse-new); however, more decisive are the factors definiteness check details and pronominalization – both highly correlated with givenness (e.g., pronouns and definite noun phrases predominantly represent given, indefinite noun phrases new information) (Weber & Müller, 2004). As these factors were not of interest in our study we ruled out any confounding effects by using given,

definite, and full noun phrases. Based on behavioral data (i.e., acceptability rating and reading time), strong contextual licensing effects for OS in German main clauses have been found if the object was in a contrastive whole-part relation to a contextually

mentioned set (partially ordered set relation according to Prince, 1998) ( Weskott, Hoernig, Fanselow, & Kliegl, 2011). Besides, a context question, which revealed the object as given and the subject as focused, improved judgments and reading times of scrambled OS in German embedded clauses ( Meng et al., 1999). How context information modulates underlying mechanisms of online sentence processing has previously been investigated by ERPs. ERP components commonly used to investigate language processing at the semantic and syntactic level, such as the well-established N400 (see e.g., Kutas and Federmeier, 2011 and Lau et al., 2008 for a review) and P600 or late positivity (Frisch et al., 2002 and Osterhout and Holcomb, 1992), have been found to be sensitive to discourse-level processing (e.g., Omipalisib in vivo Bornkessel et al., 2003, Burkhardt, 2007, Cowles et al., 2007, Hung and Schumacher, 2012, van Berkum, 2012 and Wang and Schumacher, 2013). Previous ERP studies examining context effects during sentence processing revealed an impact of givenness and focus. For instance, an early positivity around 300 ms for discourse-new focused initial objects in

scrambled OS as well as subjects in SO was interpreted in terms of reflecting processes of focus integration (e.g., Bornkessel et al., 2003). Furthermore, the scrambling negativity Roflumilast for OS in the German middlefield was enhanced if the object was given opposed to a discourse-new object (Bornkessel et al., 2003); although-based on behavioral findings- givenness of the object would be expected to license OS (Meng et al., 1999). In a related study, Bornkessel and Schlesewsky (2006b) compared OS with SO sentences. Any processing difficulties in terms of the scrambling negativity for OS compared to SO disappeared if a preceding context induced a corrective focus. Moreover, modulations of the N400 and late positivity have been proposed to index discourse integration processes (cf. SDM by Schumacher and Hung, 2012 and Wang and Schumacher, 2013, see also Section 1.2).