Abstract

The review deals with ERPs studies of sentence comprehension. After an introductory part on technical and methodological aspects, we examine research concerning syntactic and semantic violations within a sentence. We will examine some of the studies most representative of the field of investigation or of some specific linguistic aspects. In particular: studies on the syntactic violations of subjacency, subcategorization, subjec-tverb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement; ERPs and garden-path sentences; ERPs and the distinctiveness and independence of syntax and semantics. The review tries to highlight the relationship between psycholinguistics studies and the ERPs, focusing on the linguistic and methodological aspects of the experiments and on the theoretical implications of the ERPs results for theories of the human sentence processor.