Figure 3.

Shown are brain responses to plausible (solid lines) and implausible (dashed lines) continuations of sentences containing ambiguous words, split into cases in which the syntactic context picked out the dominant versus the non-dominant interpretation of those words using 100 ms pre-stimulus baseline. Whereas younger adults show robust plausibility effects for both context types, older adults show a reliable plausibility effect only when the syntactic context picks out the dominant sense, but not when the syntactic context picks out the nondominant sense (i.e., when the contextually-irrelevant meaning is the dominant one).