Effects of syntactic structure on the processing of lexical repetition during sentence reading

Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2023-07, Vol.51 (5), p.1249-1263
Main Authors: Lowder, Matthew W., Cardoso, Antonio, Pittman, Michael, Zhou, Adrian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Experiments
Eye movements
False information
Humans
Information processing
Journalists
Language
Linguistics
Pattern recognition
Psychology
Reading
Repetition
Repetition Priming
Semantics
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Summary:Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1 ), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary. In contrast, when repetition of the target word was infelicitous (Experiment 2 ), readers experienced an immediate repetition cost when repetition occurred within a clause, but this cost was eliminated entirely when repetition occurred across clause boundaries. The results have implications for word recognition during reading, processes of semantic integration, and the role of sentence structure in guiding these linguistic representations.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/s13421-022-01380-5