Who are You Talking About? Tracking Discourse-level Referential Processing with Event-related

& In this event-related brain potentials (ERPs) study, we ex-plored the possibility to selectively track referential ambiguity during spoken discourse comprehension. Earlier ERP research has shown that referentially ambiguous nouns (e.g., ‘‘the girl’’ in a two-girl context) elicit a frontal, sustained negative shift relative to unambiguous control words. In the current study, we examined whether this ERP effect reflects ‘‘deep’ ’ situation model ambiguity or ‘‘superficial’ ’ textbase ambiguity. We con-trasted these different interpretations by investigating whether a discourse-level semantic manipulation that prevents referential ambiguity also averts the elicitation of a referentially induced ERP effect. We compared ERPs elicited by nouns that were ref-erentially nonambiguous but were associated with two dis-course entities (e.g., ‘‘the girl’ ’ with two girls introduced in the context, but one of which has died or left the scene), with referentially ambiguous and nonambiguous control words. Al-though temporally referentially ambiguous nouns elicited a frontal negative shift compared to control words, the ‘‘double bound’ ’ but referentially nonambiguous nouns did not. These results suggest that it is possible to selectively track referential ambiguity with ERPs at the level that is most relevant to dis-course comprehension, the situation model. &amp