Event-related brain potentials and human language

The human capacity to produce and comprehend language is one of the most distinctive characteristics of our species. However, understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of human language has proved difficult, in part because these processes are rapid, complex and (for the most part) inaccessible to conscious reflection. Methodologies are needed that provide continuous measurement during language processing and that do not rely on a conscious response. One such method involves the recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited during language comprehension or production. ERPs are continuous, multidimensional records of the electrical activity that occurs in the brain during the process of interest. We review recent work demonstrating that ERPs are quite sensitive to (at least some of) the psychological and neural events underlying human language. Indeed, researchers have used ERPs to investigate the separability of syntactic and semantic processes, the on-line analysis of sentence constituent structure and the lexical processing capacities of language-disordered populations.