Eye movements when reading implausible sentences: Investigating potential structural influences on semantic integration

Abstract

The disruption that occurs in response to reading about implausible events in unambiguous sentences can be informative about the time course of semantic interpretation (e.g., Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Two eye-tracking studies used implausible sentences to investigate whether local factors like the structural relationships and the distance between words cueing a plausibility violation influence how quickly those words are integrated into a global semantic interpretation. Experiment 1 suggested that eye-movement disruption was unaffected by the number of words intervening between the words cueing the implausibility. Experiment 2 demonstrated that eye-movement disruption to implausibility occurred along the same time course regardless of whether the words cueing the implausibility were in a theta-assigning relation or not. These results suggest that these local structural factors do not influence how quickly new words are integrated into a semantic representation, but rather the global event representation determines the time course over which implausibility is detected.

Keywords:

• Reading comprehension
• Eye tracking
• Plausibility violations
• Semantic processing

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grants HD048990 and HD053639. We thank Kerry McConnell, Amanda Virbitsky, Erik Reichle, the Pitt Reading and Language lab, and the audience of Psychonomics 2007, as well as Rhonda McClain and Alison Trude for assistance in data collection.

Notes

¹ All reported t tests were two-tailed.