Comprehend Language

I'm Cara Feder Meyer I'm in the psychology department and my laboratory at the Beckman uses measures of brain electrical activity to try to understand how people comprehend language. We bring people into the laboratory, put sensors on their heads that will pick up the electrical activity occurring in the brain, and we ask them simply in many cases to read or to listen for comprehension. And, by measuring brain electrical activity we can see the moment when the brain begins to construct the meaning of a word or a sentence. We can also see how different parts of the brain might do so differently with a left hemisphere, for example, seeming to make guesses in advance about what words might be coming up in a sentence, and the right instead waiting to see what words come in allowing it to deal with more unexpected events in language. We can also see how these processes differ across people and across different circumstances and we can watch how people's use of different comprehension strategies changes as they age.