Abstract
During text reading, the parafoveal word was usually presented between 2° and 5° from the point of fixation. Whether semantic information of parafoveal words can be processed during sentence reading is a critical and long-standing issue. Recently, studies using the RSVP-flanker paradigm have shown that the incongruent parafoveal word, presented as right flanker, elicited a more negative N400 compared with the congruent parafoveal word. This suggests that the semantic information of parafoveal words can be extracted and integrated during sentence reading, because the N400 effect is a classical index of semantic integration. However, as most previous studies did not control the word-pair congruency of the parafoveal and the foveal words that were presented in the critical triad, it is still unclear whether such integration happened at the sentence level or just at the word-pair level. The present study addressed this question by manipulating verbs in Chinese sentences to yield either a semantically congruent or semantically incongruent context for the critical noun. In particular, the interval between the critical nouns and verbs was controlled to be 4 or 5 characters. Thus, to detect the incongruence of the parafoveal noun, participants had to integrate it with the global sentential context. The results revealed that the N400 time-locked to the critical triads was more negative in incongruent than in congruent sentences, suggesting that parafoveal semantic information can be integrated at the sentence level during Chinese reading.
Highlights
Reading of text requires readers to move their eyes to bring the material of interest into their foveal vision field, given that the information acquired during one fixation time is quite limited [1]
The present study explored the semantic integration of parafoveal words in Chinese sentence reading by using event-related brain potentials (ERP) technique with the RSVP-flanker paradigm
The results showed that the N400 component time-locked to the onset of critical triads was more negative in the doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0139016.g003
Summary
Reading of text requires readers to move their eyes to bring the material of interest into their foveal vision field, given that the information acquired during one fixation time is quite limited [1]. In one illustration sentence in Barber’s study [20], “Mary bought her new bike/head last week because it was on sale”, the parafoveal target “bike/head” is congruent/incongruent with the foveal pre-target “new”, both of which were presented in the critical triad To detect such incongruence, participants did not necessarily integrate the parafoveal information with the global semantic context of the sentence; rather, all they needed to do was to process a word-pair composed of the foveal and parafoveal words. The results showed that integrating the object noun with the classifier (the word prior to the object noun) or with the verb from previous context occurred in the same N400 time window This suggests that integration with global semantic context can be conducted as rapidly as integration at the word-pair level during sentence reading. If a more negative N400 time-locked to the onset of the critical triads could be elicited in the incongruent condition compared with the congruent condition, it would suggest that semantic information in parafovea could be integrated at the sentence level within a short perception time
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