Understanding Sentences in Context What Brain Waves Can Tell Us

ABSTRACT—Language comprehension looks pretty easy. Youpick upanovel and simply enjoy the plot, or ponder the human condition. You strike a conversation and listen to whatever the other personhas to say. Althoughwhat you’re taking in is a bunch of letters and sounds, what you really perceive—if all goes well—is meaning. But how do you get from one to the other so easily? The experiments with brain waves (event-related brain potentials or ERPs) reviewed here show that the linguistic brain rapidly draws upon a wide variety of information sources, including prior text and inferences about the speaker. Furthermore, people anticipate what might be said about whom, they use heu-ristics to arrive at the earliest possible interpretation, and if it makes sense, they sometimes even ignore the grammar. Language comprehension is opportunistic, proactive, and