The Impact of Sentence Context on the Morphological Processing of Single Words: Electrophysiological Evidence

Sentences potentially enrich the meaning of a given word and change the way it is understood and interpreted. Psycholinguistic research suggests that the brain processes words differently if they are embedded in sentences rather than presented in isolation. Electrophysiological methods and cutting-edge neuroscientific techniques have been applied to provide a fine-grained account of the influence of sentence context on the time course of word processing, with a focus on morphological aspects of word recognition (derivation and inflection). This chapter reviews and summarizes the available electrophysiological findings on how our brain treats morphologically complex words presented in a rich linguistic context. This brief review complements the available theoretical models of morphological analysis by highlighting the impact of sentence context on the electrophysiological correlates of morphologically complex word recognition.