Figure 1.

Task design. (A) Schematic illustration of trial structure. On each trial, subjects heard a sentence while viewing a fixation cross. After a 3-s delay, two pictures appeared, the target and a foil. (B) Illustration of the placement of digital triggers within the sound files of individual sentences, to allow analysis of EEG–MEG data timelocked to specific points within and following the sentence. (C) A sample picture set for the reversible sentence “The woman who the man is teaching is very tired right now.” The target shows the correct arrangement. A syntactic foil has the thematic roles of the two named actors switched, while a lexical foil substitutes one of the actors. (D) A sample picture set for the non-reversible sentence “The glass that the man is washing has a small chip in it.”