People comprehend utterances rapidly and without conscious effort. Traditional theories assume that sentence processing is algorithmic and that meaning is derived compositionally. The language processor is believed to generate representations of the linguistic input that are complete, detailed, and accurate. However, recent findings challenge these assumptions. Investigations of the misinterpre...

An event-related brain potential experiment was carried out to investigate on-line thematic role assignment during sentence-picture matching in patients with Broca's aphasia. Subjects were presented with a picture that was followed by an auditory sentence. The sentence either matched the picture or mismatched the visual information depicted. Sentences differed in complexity, and ranged from sim...

Background As you read this sentence, you are performing the complex task of composing the meaning of these words into a whole proposition. A multitude of work in psycholinguistics has shown that humans use both the semantics (the meaning of the words) and the syntax (their order) of a sentence to process its meaning. However, the rules by which the brain combines this information are largely u...

With this research we investigated the real-time electrophysiological correlates of noun-verb agreement checking during the comprehension of normal passive sentences in French. Event-related potentials were acquired while participants read passive sentences that contained covert (singular, masculine) or overt (plural, feminine) noun verb agreement. Results show that the processing of agreeing v...

Research into agrammatic comprehension in English has described a pattern of impaired understanding of passives and retained ability on active constructions. Some accounts of this dissociation predict that patients who are unable to comprehend actives will also be impaired in the comprehension of passives. We report the case of a man with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (WR), whose comprehens...

With this research we investigated the real-time electrophysiological correlates of noun–verb agreement checking during the comprehension of correct passive sentences in French. Event-related potentials were acquired while participants read passive sentences that contained covert (singular, masculine) or overt (plural, feminine) noun–verb agreement. Results show that the processing of overtly o...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been proven to be a useful tool to complement clinical assessment and to detect residual cognitive functions in patients with disorders of consciousness. These ERPs are often recorded using passive or unspecific instructions. Patient data obtained this way are then compared to data from healthy participants, which are usually recorded using active instructio...

Abstract There is accumulating evidence that distinct forms of domain-general inhibition underlie the selection lexical candidates from among co-activated representations in single-word production. It less clear whether similar control processes are engaged resolution syntactic conflict sentence This study assessed relative contribution three types inhibitory operating at different stages infor...

Research on the neural organization of syntax - the core structure-building component of language - has focused on Broca's area and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) as the chief candidates for syntactic processing. However, these proposals have received considerable challenges. In order to better understand the neural basis of syntactic processing, we performed a functional magnetic resonance i...