Lee Osterhout

losterho@u.washington.edu
Professor, Department of Psychology

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Research in my lab is designed to learn more about the biological and cognitive mechanisms underlying human language. The primary method employed in my lab involves recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from the scalp while subjects read or listen to language. ERPs reflect the summed, simultaneously occurring postsynaptic activity in large groups of neurons in the brain. Using this method, we have learned, for example, that the brain responds differently to anomalies involving sentence structure (syntax) and sentence meaning (semantics). Furthermore, these language-sensitive ERP effects can be used to investigate the syntactic and semantic analysis of language comprehension as it occurs over time. We have recently used ERPs to study the changes in brain activity that are associated with second-language acquisition and individual differences in the processing of complex sentences.