Co-registered eye-movements and brain potentials reveal multiple effects
of context across the visual field in natural reading
Abstract
This study investigates how expectancy and plausibility influence
behavioral and neural measures of language processing during
naturalistic reading comprehension. Prior event-related potential (ERP)
studies show evidence of distinct post-N400 positivities to violations
of semantic expectancy and plausibility using artificial serial
presentation but have yet to establish these phenomena during
naturalistic reading. Therefore, we recorded simultaneous eye-movements
and EEG while participants read highly-constraining sentences with
expected, unexpected (but plausible), and anomalous target words.
Time-locked to the pre-target word, we observed a contextually-graded
parafoveal N400 effect. The N400 was facilitated (i.e., reduced) when
the word was subsequently fixated, suggesting trans-saccadic integration
of semantic features. At target fixation, we also observed a late
anteriorly-distributed positivity to unexpected target words and a
posteriorly-distributed positivity to anomalous target words, effects
that were not present when time-locked to the pre-target word. Eye
tracking measures show that readers were sensitive to both expectancy
and plausibility at target fixation. In conclusion, we show that readers
can begin accessing semantic information in parafoveal vision, but
higher-level semantic processing may require the orchestration of both
parafoveal and foveal representations.