WORDS AND SENTENCES - EVENT-RELATED BRAIN POTENTIAL MEASURES

Interactions between sentences and the individual words that comprise them are reviewed in studies using the event-related brain potential ( ERP). Results suggest that, for ambiguous words preceded by a biasing sentence context, context is used at an early stage to constrain the r elevant sense of a word rather than select among multiple active sense s. A study comparing associative single-word context and sentence-leve l context also suggests that sentence context influences the earliest stage of semantic analysis, but that the ability to use sentence conte xt effectively is more demanding of working memory than the ability to use single-word contexts. Another indication that sentence context ha s a dramatic effect on single-word processing was the observation that high- and low-frequency words elicit different ERPs at the beginnings of sentences but that this effect is suppressed by a meaningful sente nce context.