Recent research has shown that language comprehension is guided by knowledge about
the organization of objects and events in long-term memory. We use event-related brain
potentials (ERPs) to determine the extent to which perceptuomotor object knowledge and
event knowledge are immediately activated during incremental language processing. Event-
related but anomalous sentence continuations preceded by single-sentence event
descriptions elicited reduced N400s, despite their poor fit within local sentence contexts …

… We focus on perceptuomotor knowledge. There is mounting evidence that motion5,
shape6-9, color10, action5,11-13, and auditory5,13 object knowledge are routinely activated
during single word and picture processing, but what about during sentence comprehension?
… Novel evidence for immediate and incremental activation of perceptuomotor
object knowledge and generalized event knowledge during sentence processing. …