Electrophysiological evidence for the flexibility of lexical processing

Publisher Summary This chapter presents pervasive influence of sentence-level context. The sentence-level context effects are seen in the same experimental tasks that yield associative context and frequency effects, the question arises as to which, if any, of these effects originates in the lexicon. This leads to the more general question concerning the constituents of a “lexical entry”: abstract orthographic and/or phonemic information only, the syntactic category of the word, and some basic semantic information. The process that yields frequency effects for words presented in isolation is neither mandatory nor immune to sentence-level context. The influence of sentence-level context can be as powerful and act as early as that of a single lexically associated word, and sentence context can be used to pick out the appropriate core meaning of an ambiguous word without first passing through an early stage of indiscriminate semantic activation.