To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word's context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution. We measured the similarity between multi...

Title of Document: TESTING A DYNAMIC ACCOUNT OF NEURAL PROCESSING: BEHAVIORAL AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF SEMANTIC SATIATION Xing Tian, Ph.D., 2008 Directed By: Professor Michael Dougherty, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland In everyday perception, we easily and automatically identify objects. However, there is evidence that this ability results from complicated interactio...