Grand average ERPs (mean amplitude) across the sentence at prefrontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital sites. A clear negativity emerges at the verb when the mismatch between verb and action becomes apparent, and later, at the second noun (patient). Spline-interpolated difference scores at the verb and the second noun illustrate the centro-parietal (verb) and right lateral (second noun) distribution of these two ERP effects.