title: 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.
authors: University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors: Nikole D
authors: ND
authors: Patson
authors: Tessa
authors: T
authors: Warren
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students; D013997:Time Factors; D014495:Universities