Vibrational sum-frequency generation (SFG) employing femtosecond infrared (IR) laser pulses is used to study the dynamics of the C-O stretch vibration on Ru(0 0 1). Time-resolved measurements of the free induction decay (FID) of the IR-polarization for 0.33 ML CO/Ru(0 0 1) exhibit single exponential decays over three decades corresponding to dephasing times of T 2 = 1.94 ps at 95 K and T 2 = 1.16 ps at 340 K. This is consistent with pure homogeneous broadening due to anharmonic coupling with the thermally activated low-frequency dephasing mode together with a contribution from saturation of the IR transition. In pump-probe SFG experiments using a strong visible (VIS) pump pulse the perturbation of the FID leads to transient line shifts even at negative delay times, i.e. when the IR-VIS SFG probe pair precedes the pump pulse. Based on an analysis of the time-dependent polarization we discuss the influence of the perturbed FID on time-resolved SFG spectra. We investigate how coherent effects affect the SFG spectra and we examine the time resolution in these experiments, in particular in dependence of the dephasing time. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.