We hypothesized two types of metrical biases that might be evoked when only initially stressed targets are presented as was the case in our former unimodal priming study (Schild et al., 2014). First, stress clashes might enhance processing effort in the stress match condition only for initially stressed targets. The present results do not support this notion because the target words’ stress pattern did not significantly modulate the ERP stress priming effect, and the previously obtained polarity of ERP stress priming was not replicated. Second, systematic prosodic regularity

resulting from the restriction to initially stressed GSK2656157 mw targets (see Table 1A) might be taken into account by some aspects of neurobiological target word processing, and those aspects might dominate the ERPs. Indeed, by avoiding systematic prosodic regularity in the present unimodal auditory study we did not find the same stress check details priming effect as in our former unimodal auditory study. We can conclude that our previous results show that prosodic expectancies established

within a given study have an impact on ERP outcomes. In our former unimodal experiment (Schild et al., 2014), participants might have taken into account prosodic regularities established by the materials. Across the experiment, the probability that a stressed syllable was followed by an unstressed syllable was high due to the initially

stressed target words with their stressed-unstressed pattern (see Table Farnesyltransferase 1A). Stress match deviated from this systematic prosodic pattern. A single stress match trial was characterized by a stressed syllable (the prime) followed by a further stressed syllable (first syllable of the initially stressed target). Hence, enhanced negativity for stress match might be linked to deviation from the highly probably stressed–unstressed pattern of the targets. In line with this interpretation are several studies reporting enhanced negativity for prosodic irregularity (Bohn et al., 2013, Magne et al., 2007, McCauley et al., 2013 and Rothermich et al., 2010). Phoneme-free prosodic word form representations appear to be involved in ERP stress priming obtained in the present and in our previous cross-modal study (Friedrich, Kotz, Friederici, & Alter, 2004). The very same target words were presented in stress match trials and in stress mismatch trials. It was only the combination of the stress of the primes and the stress pattern of the target words that elicited ERP stress priming in both studies. In the present unimodal study, this effect might be deduced to the immediate repetition of two stressed (or unstressed) syllables in stress match conditions. However, this interpretation does not apply to the former cross-modal study with written targets.