Zusammenfassung
Based on the results of an event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment (van Berkum, Brown, &
Hagoort. 1999a, b), we have recently argued that discourse-level referential context can be taken
into account extremely rapidly by the parser. Moreover, our ERP results indicated that local gram-
matical gender information, although available within a few hundred milliseconds from word onset,
is not always used quickly enough to prevent the parser from considering a discourse-supported,
but agreement-violating, syntactic analysis. In a comment on our work, Brysbaert and Mitchell
(2000) have raised concerns about the methodology of our ERP experiment and have challenged
our interpretation of the results. In this reply, we argue that these concerns are unwarranted and,
that, in contrast to our own interpretation, the alternative explanations provided by Brysbaert and
Mitchell do not account for the full pattern of ERP results.
Nutzer