The Time-Course of Lexical Access and the Role of Context: Converging Evidence from Normal and Aphasic Processing

The purpose of this chapter is to consolidate existing literature and introduce new evidence from both focal lesion and neurologically unimpaired populations which speak to the behavioral processes and neural substrates involved in lexical access and lexical ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. The chapter is dedicated to Edgar Zurif, and in many ways, writing it has brought each of its authors full circle. It was in the very initial years of dealing with issues of context effects, lexical access, and mental modularity in Boston that Edgar exerted his influence on work by the first author concerning the issues inherent in claims of contextually independent mental processes and how such processes might play out in terms of brain organization. His influence in those early years was crucial, conceptually, central, and substantial (not to mention insistent). Soon thereafter, the second author joined Edgar at the Veterans Administration in Boston, and new consideration of the work on "bugs, bugs, bugs" (as the lexical ambiguity issues were referred to in those environs) brought on a resurgence of (re)considerations of the role of lexical processes in agrammatic aphasia. The third author joined this team a few years later. None of the excitement nor effectiveness of the work in either of those eras could have occurred without Edgar's central role. Now, after quite a number of years working in other realms of language processing, we find ourselves