Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 1989 Jan;18(1):51-60.
doi: 10.1007/BF01069046.

Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension

S M Garnsey  1 , M K Tanenhaus, R M Chapman
Affiliations

Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension

S M Garnsey et al. J Psycholinguist Res. 1989 Jan.

Abstract

Evoked brain potentials were used to monitor moment-by-moment decisions during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities for which one of the possible interpretations was semantically implausible. The N400 component of the evoked potential, which is sensitive to implausibility, was used to discover when during a sentence subjects made a decision about the ambiguity. The results demonstrate that readers try to interpret a syntactic ambiguity early in a sentence rather than waiting for disambiguating information. This introduces a new way to use brain activity to study sentence comprehension processes.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Science. 1980 Jan 11;207(4427):203-5 - PubMed
    1. Psychophysiology. 1987 Jan;24(1):14-25 - PubMed
    1. Cognition. 1988 Jun;29(1):63-71 - PubMed
    1. J Psycholinguist Res. 1989 Jan;18(1):37-50 - PubMed
    1. Mem Cognit. 1983 Sep;11(5):539-50 - PubMed

Publication types