During sentence comprehension, it is ofien necessary to retrieve earlier information across potentially interfering intervening material in order to link it with later information. For example, for the sentence "The client who had implied that the visitor was important was complaining，” “client” has to be retrieved as the subject of “was complaining” across the embedded clause including the noun “visitor.” Interférence occurs when the intervening material partially matches the retrieval cues generated by the verb based on either semantic and/or syntactic features (Van Dyke, 2007). Using event-related flS/IRI, we examined the brain regions involved in resolving interièrence in sentence comprehension. Previous findings suggest a role for the left inferior frontal gyms (LIFG) in resolving semantic interference (Kan & Thompson-Schill, 2004) and we wished to determine if this region would be involved in resolving semantic and syntactic interièrence in sentence processing. As the LIFG is ofien damaged in aphasia^ the findings would have implications for patients’ sentence comprehension di伍culties.
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