Close, but no garlic: Perceptuomotor and event knowledge activation during language comprehension

Recent research has shown that language comprehension is guided by knowledge about the organization of objects and events in long-term memory. We use event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to determine the extent to which perceptuomotor object knowledge and event knowledge are immediately activated during incremental language processing. Event-related but anomalous sentence continuations preceded by single-sentence event descriptions elicited reduced N400s, despite their poor fit within local sentence contexts. Anomalous words sharing particular sensory or motor attributes with contextually expected words also elicited reduced N400s, despite being inconsistent with global context (i.e., event information). We rule out plausibility as an explanation for both relatedness effects. We show that perceptuomotor-related facilitation is not due to lexical priming between words in the local context and the target or to associative or categorical relationships between expected and unexpected targets. Overall our results are consistent with the immediate and incremental activation of perceptual and motor object knowledge and generalized event knowledge during sentence processing.