Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

the formulation of the models that could explain how particular elements of language
behavior could be impaired due to different positions of brain lesions (e.g. Wernicke-
Geschwind model (Geschwind, 1972)). These two types of models operated with
different notions: while phonological encoding, noun phrase or thematic relations are the
building blocks of the former, production, sound images or disconnections were the
notions typically encountered in the later models. Although today all models must
provide a neurobiologically plausible picture of language-related processes, in this
introduction the distinction between the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic models will
be kept in order to emphasize the information processing motivation of the former
models and the interest in the brain substrate of the language function and its explanation
in terms of other cognitive processes of the latter.
1.2.1. Psycholinguistic models
Serial processing and parallel processing models. Understanding sentences is
fundamentally different from understanding words. While the process of word
comprehension must involve some kind of checking the input against items stored in
memory, the meaning of a sentence is constructed on line and the number of possible
sentences is unlimited. Psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension try to link the
elements of grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax) to semantics; in other words
sentence comprehension is viewed as some sort of mapping from form to meaning.
Generally, there are two groups of psycholinguistic models: serial processing and
parallel processing models, depending how they view the time-course of the processes.
In serial processing models the parser builds the sentence structure in a step-by-step
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