The neural correlates of word position and lexical predictability during sentence reading: evidence from fixation-related fMRI

ABSTRACT

By means of combining eye-tracking and fMRI, the present study aimed to investigate aspects of higher linguistic processing during natural reading which were formerly hard to assess with traditional paradigms. Specifically, we investigated the haemodynamic effects of incremental sentence comprehension – as operationalised by word position – and its relation to context-based word-level effects of lexical predictability. We observed that an increasing amount of words being processed was associated with an increase in activation in the left posterior middle temporal and angular gyri. At the same time, left occipito-temporal regions showed a decrease in activation with increasing word position. Region of interest (ROI) analyses revealed differential effects of word position and predictability within dissociable parts of the semantic network – showing that it is expedient to consider these effects conjointly.

KEYWORDS:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging
• sentence processing
• lexico-semantic processing
• predictability
• eye movement control during reading

Acknowledgements

We thank Julian Wenzel, Lisa Wiesner and Nicola Jacobi for their help with data acquisition. We are grateful to Reinhold Kliegl for providing us the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. We are grateful for the helpful comments of John M. Henderson and one additional anonymous reviewer which greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stefan Hawelka http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5304-8521

Fabio Richlan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5373-3425

Florian Hutzler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8195-4911

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 25799-B23).