The interplay of discourse congruence and lexical association during sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs and eye tracking

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of memory and language 2007, Vol.56 (1), p.103-128
Main Authors: Camblin, C. Christine, Gordon, Peter C., Swaab, Tamara Y.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Association
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Discourse
Discourse analysis
Electrophysiology
Event-related potentials
Eye Movements
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Language
Language Processing
Lexical
Linguistics
Measures (Individuals)
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading comprehension
Reading Processes
Semantics
Sentence Structure
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Summary:Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was associated or not. Violations of discourse congruence had early and lingering effects on ERP and eye-tracking measures. This indicates that discourse representations have a rapid effect on lexical semantic processing even in locally congruous texts. In contrast, effects of association were more malleable: Very early effects of associative priming were only robust when the discourse context was absent or not cohesive. Together these results suggest that the global discourse model quickly influences lexical processing in sentences, and that spreading activation from associative priming does not contribute to natural reading in discourse contexts.
ISSN:0749-596X
1096-0821
DOI:10.1016/j.jml.2006.07.005