The proposed research aims to chart sentence processing as it unfolds over time in both normal and the neurologically impaired. the purpose in doing so is to merge linguistic issues involving the representation of verbs and real-time processing issues, those that directly concern the molecular nature of sentence processing. These issues specifically involve what happens after the verb and its structural properties are activated during sentence comprehension - when verb processing must interact with the further course of sentence processing. The experiments to be conducted will primarily use a complex secondary task - a cross-modal lexical decision - to assess local sentence processing load, both at the verb and at points after the appearance of the verb during the temporal unfolding of the sentence. The significance of this research lies in its exploration of brain/language relations, specifically, in the exploration of the lexical knowledge base and the devices that exploit this knowledge for the purpose of sentence understanding.
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