The present accent rating study investigates the interactionbetween accent strength and grammatical correctness on per-ceived accentedness. German native (L1) listeners rated Ger-man sentences produced by L1 and non-native (L2) speakers.Sentences either contained a grammatical error or were gram-matically correct. Results showed that grammatical correct-ness affected the accent rating of sentences produced by L1speakers, but not of those by L2 speakers. The inverse influ-ence of grammatical errors on sentences spoken with strongeraccents suggests that phonological information plays a moreimportant role for global perception of speech accentednessthan grammatical correctness does, revealing a hierarchical im-portance of factors that form an L2 accent. This finding is inline with recent findings from an online processing ERP study(Hanul ́ıkov ́a, van Alphen, van Goch, & Weber, 2012) in whichL1 listeners were tolerant towards grammatical errors made byL2 speakers, i.e. showed no P600 effect for grammatically in-correct sentences.

Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative meaning in addition to the literal meaning of individual words within an idiom. This experiment showed increased priming for visual targets related to the figurative meaning of an idiom when the experimental list contained a large proportion of idiomatic sentences compared to when the list contained only a small proportion of idiomatic sentences. Non-native speakers not only showed online access to figurative meaning but were also sensitive to highly idiomatic contexts; though, responses to the targets related to literal meaning of the final word of the idiom were faster in all instances than figuratively-related targets.