With accumulating data attesting to the prevalent role of sentence and discourse context information in shaping language comprehension, a key question for the field became when and how context affects the processing of an incoming word. Answers to these questions would help adjudicate between bottom-up processing models and interactive ones, in which top-down and bottom-up information are assumed to be processed in parallel and in a mutually constraining manner. ERP work in this time period provided some of the earliest and most powerful evidence showing that context shapes word processing from its earliest stages. Indeed, it became clear that, at least for young adult comprehenders, context information actually serves to pre-activate features of likely upcoming words, such that the processing of unexpected stimuli that share semantic (Kutas & Federmeier 2000) or even orthographic (Laszlo & Federmeier 2009) features with predicted items is facilitated. Strong evidence for predictive processing in language came from ERP studies that examined responses to words preceding a predicted target – for example, function words or adjectives that, while perfectly compatible with the accrued context information, matched
