Meaning-driven syntactic predictions in a parallel processing architecture: Theory and algorithmic modeling of ERP effects.

Syntactic and semantic information processing can interact selectively during language comprehension. However, the nature and extent of the interactions, in particular of semantic effects on syntax, remain to some extent elusive. We revisit an influential ERP result by Kim and Osterhout (2005), later replicated by Kim and Sikos (2011), that the verb in sentences such as 'The hearty meal was devouring … ' evokes a P600 effect-a signature of syntactic processing difficulty-even though all stimuli were grammatically well-formed.