Marta Kutas

Her discovery of the N400 brain wave in 1980 opened up a new field of research wherein semantic analysis, language processing can be tracked in real time word-by-word. Using electrophysiological measures of brain activity, Kutas has made major contributions to psycholinguists by showing how incoming sensory information combines immediately with contextual information in long term memory  to construct conceptual meaning. Her studies have clarified the role of prediction in sentence processing, the respective roles of the two cerebral hemispheres in language comprehension, and have demonstrated how semantic processing changes with normal and abnormal aging. She also brings science to the arts via poetry.