Content and organization of knowledge and its use in language
                        comprehension
                                        Marta Kutas
                             University of California, San Diego
                                      mkutas@ucsd.edu

Significant work takes place at the language-memory interface that supports word and sen-
tence processing. Both the content and the functional organization of our world knowledge im-
pact language comprehension in real time. Each cerebral hemisphere is involved, albeit in dif-
ferent ways. The nature of knowledge organization (associative, categorical, events, perceptuo-
motor) and their use in predictive and/or integrative language processing have been revealed
via investigations employing event-related brain potentials (ERPs). I will review some of our
electrophysiological work supporting the idea that language processing is immediate and in-
cremental, contextual, sometimes predictive, multi-modal, and bi-hemispheric.




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