Auditory sentence processing an introduction.

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 theDutch 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. Themethods 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