Big brown dog or brown big dog? An electrophysiological study of semantic constraints on prenominal adjective order David Kemmerer a,b,c, * , Christine Weber-Fox a , Karen Price a , Cynthia Zdanczyk b , Heather Way a a Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1353, USA b Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, USA c Department of Neurology, Division of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa College of Medicine, USA Accepted 5 December 2005 Abstract Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read and made acceptability judgments about sentences con- taining three types of adjective sequences: (1) normal sequences—e.g., Jennifer rode a huge gray elephant; (2) reversed sequences that vio- late grammatical-semantic constraints on linear order—e.g., *Jennifer rode a gray huge elephant; and (3) contradictory sequences that violate lexical-semantic constraints on compositionality—e.g., *Jennifer rode a small huge elephant. Relative to the control condition, the second adjective elicited a reduced N400 and an enhanced P600 in both the reversal condition and the contradiction condition. We present several alternative accounts of these two effects, but favor an interpretation which treats them as reflecting semantic and syn- tactic aspects of a temporary reanalysis of the adjective order construction. Furthermore, relative to the control condition, the final noun elicited a robust N400 in the contradiction condition but not in the reversal condition. We suggest that this effect indexes the full reg- istration of the lexical-semantic incompatibility of the two adjectives in the contradiction condition. Finally, we discuss how all of these findings fit into the broader context of recent ERP studies that have reported atypical N400s and robust P600s in response to certain types of semantic anomalies. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Semantics; Syntax; Language; Adjectives; N400; P600; ERP; Event-related potentials 1. Introduction A large body of electrophysiological research on lan- guage comprehension supports the view that distinct event-related brain potential (ERP) components are associ- ated with semantic and syntactic levels of online processing (see Brown, Hagoort, & Kutas, 2000, for a review). Several recent studies, however, suggest that two of the most well- established associations—specifically, the link between the N400 and semantics, and the link between the P600 and syntax—are more complicated than previously thought (Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, & Fernandez-Frias, 2005; Hoeks, Stowe, & Doedens, 2004; Kim & Osterhout, 2005; Kolk, Chwilla, van Herten, & Oor, 2003; Kuperberg, Sitnikova, Caplan, & Holcomb, 2003; Kuperberg, Caplan, Sitnikova, Eddy, & Holcomb, in press; Kuperberg, Kreher, Sitnikova, Caplan, & Holcomb, in press; Van Herten, Kolk, & Chwilla, 2005). We report a new study that con- tributes to this re-assessment of the N400 and P600 compo- nents by focusing on a relatively neglected linguistic phenomenon that involves an especially interesting interac- tion between semantics and syntax—namely, the tendency for certain semantic classes of descriptive adjectives to be ordered in particular sequences before nouns (e.g., big brown dog vs. *brown big dog). The most intensively studied ERP component related to language is the N400 (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980, 1984; for reviews see Hinojosa, Martin-Loeches, & Rubia, 2001; Kutas & Federmeier, 2000; Kutas & Van Petten, 1994). 0093-934X/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2005.12.002 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 765 494 0771. E-mail address: kemmerer@purdue.edu (D. Kemmerer). www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l Brain and Language xxx (2006) xxx–xxx ARTICLE IN PRESS