Understanding language comprehension

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The proposed research is designed to provide insight into how people use knowledge of events to facilitate language comprehension. One important goal of this research is that it investigates how different grammatical inflections associated with verbs influences the activation of event knowledge in semantic memory. A second goal is to examine how verbal inflections interact with the temporal and causal structure of events to determine how people resolve the referents for pronouns - a process crucial to successful language comprehension. A third goal is to provide insight into how the two cerebral hemispheres process grammatical inflections and event knowledge jointly and individually to determine the critical process of understanding who is doing what to whom in sentences. Finally, this research uses Event-Related Brain Potential methodology (ERP) to provide insight into the neurocognitive underpinnings of these crucial processes during language comprehension on a millisecond time-scale.