In neurocognitive research on language, the processing principles of the system at hand are usually assumed to be relatively invariant. However, research on attention, memory, decision-making, and social judgment has shown that mood can substantially modulate how the brain processes information. For example, in a bad mood, people typically have a narrower focus of attention and rely less on heuristics. In the face of such pervasive mood effects elsewhere in the brain, it seems unlikely that language processing would remain untouched. In an EEG experiment, we manipulated the mood of participants just before they read texts that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based expectations about who would be talked about next (e.g., that “David praised Linda because … ” would continue about Linda, not David), or that respected or violated a syntactic agreement rule (e.g., “The boys turns”). ERPs showed that mood had little effect on syntactic parsing, but did substantially affect referential anticipation: whereas readers anticipated information about a specific person when they were in a good mood, a bad mood completely abolished such anticipation. A behavioral follow-up experiment suggested that a bad mood did not interfere with verb-based expectations per se, but prevented readers from using that information rapidly enough to predict upcoming reference on the fly, as the sentence unfolds. In all, our results reveal that background mood, a rather unobtrusive affective state, selectively changes a crucial aspect of real-time language processing. This observation fits well with other observed interactions between language processing and affect (emotions, preferences, attitudes, mood), and more generally testifies to the importance of studying “cold” cognitive functions in relation to “hot” aspects of the brain.

The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming during on-line processing of Dutch sentences. Results are contrasted with data from a third CMLP experiment on priming of nouns in similar sentences. It is demonstrated that the meaning of a matrix verb remains active throughout the entire matrix clause, while this is not the case for the meaning of a subject head noun. Activation of the meaning of the verb only dissipates upon encountering a clear signal as to the start of a new clause.

Mensch: A German word which, in Yiddish, means "a good person". A mensch is a particularly good person with the qualities one would hope for in a dear friend or trusted colleague; a gentleman. In 2000, Dave Swinney and Roelien Bastiaanse started a joint project on online sentence processing in Dutch and English. This project, entitled "The role of the verb in online auditory sentence processing in Dutch" was financed by the Dutch Science Foundation (Nederlandse Organisatie voor wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: NWO). One of the collaborators on this project was Lew Shapiro, who initiated a parallel study in English. The foci of the project included verb gap filling and the violation of verb-object order in Dutch. The methods employed involve methodologies that allow for millisecond level investigations of auditory sentence processing; Cross Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) and Event-Related Potentials (ERP). This project was the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration between San Diego and Groningen. The project resulted in a workshop which focused on the exploration of sentence processing across multiple populations: children and adults with and without language impairments, second language learners, and aphasic individuals. The central focus of the workshop was on the use and sensitivity of the CMLP technique. The present volume is a culmination of the work presented at this workshop. Cross Modal Priming (CMP) is one of the most fruitful techniques for measuring online (real time) auditory sentence processing. It was developed in 1979 by Dave Swinney for his famous investigation on the online activation of ambiguous word meanings within sentence contexts. In this study he showed that when a listener hears an ambiguous word, both a primary and secondary meaning are activated, regardless of biasing context. After this study, Dave Swinney used this technique to explore many theoretical issues in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Perhaps most

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