and Federmeier, 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2011).While pseudowords resemble real words in that they obey the orthographic and phonotactic rules, they carry no meaning. Consequently, the N400 has been interpreted as an attempt to access and integrate a semantic representation into the current context (Halgren, 1990; Brown and Hagoort, 1993; Friederici, 1997; Kutas and Federmeier, 2000, 2011; Holcomb et al., 2002; Van Petten and Luka, 2006). In contrast to the time-domain studies, we have applied TF analysis which is sensitive to oscillatory dynamics. Our results clearly indicate that real words elicit stronger theta power than PW in the left temporo-prefrontal areas associated with language processing. This finding is consistent with previous EEG evidence of theta sensitivity to the outcome of semantic retrieval (Bastiaansen and Hagoort, 2006). It has been shown that theta power is modulated by semantic incongruity within sentences (Hagoort et al., 2004; Hald et al., 2006) and word pairs that are thematically associated (Maguire et al., 2010). Theta also increases to nouns, verbs and adjectives (i.e., open class words) compared to semantically impoverished closed class words (e.g., prepositions; Bastiaansen et al., 2005). In a study manipulating visual vs. auditory semantic properties of the words embedded in a lexical
