Register affects language comprehension: ERP evidence from article omission in newspaper headlines

Abstract

Language processing involving syntax-discourse interface operations has been claimed to be particularly resource-consuming. In production, this additional complexity is claimed to be the source of article omission in the speech of young children and certain language-impaired speakers. In comprehension, article omission in some “special registers” (e.g., newspaper headlines) has been attributed to the trade-off between spending more processing resources and increasing processing speed. We investigated the comprehension of noun phrases (NPs) with and without articles (e.g., ( a) policeman arrests (a) monk) when readers were or were not aware of reading headlines by recording electrophysiological responses. The presence of an N400-effect suggests first that comprehension of article-less NPs exerts processing demands and indicates that article omission does not result in costs from morphosyntactic processing (no LAN), but from linking processes at the syntax-discourse interface supported by discourse-semantic memory. Differences between the instruction modalities suggest that awareness of the special register plays a role. The electrophysiological data thus demonstrate that register has an effect on the discourse-semantic integration of NPs and provide evidence for a certain degree of top-down processing.