Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used
to investigate how and when a semantic factor (animacy)
affects the early analysis of a difficult syntactic structure,
namely, object relative sentences. We contrasted electrophysiological
and behavioral responses to two object relative types that
were syntactically and lexically identical and varied only
in the order of the component animate and inanimate nouns
[Inanimate (Animate) vs. Animate (Inanimate)].
ERPs were recorded from 40 subjects to each word of 30
I(A) and 30 A(I) sentences that occurred randomly among
a set of various other sentence types read for comprehension.
ERP effects to the early noun animacy manipulation were
observed beginning with the initial noun and extending
past the main clause verbs. We interpret the timing and
multitude of electrophysiological effects, including the
N400, P600, and left-anterior negativity, as evidence that
both semantic and syntactic, and perhaps other types of
information, are used early during structural analysis
and message-level computations as needed for comprehension.