title: Does Temporal Integration Occur for Unrecognizable Words in Visual Crowding?
abstract: Visual crowding-the inability to see an object when it is surrounded by flankers in the periphery-does not block semantic activation: unrecognizable words due to visual crowding still generated robust semantic priming in subsequent lexical decision tasks. Based on the previous finding, the current study further explored whether unrecognizable crowded words can be temporally integrated into a phrase. By showing one word at a time, we presented Chinese four-word idioms with either a congruent or incongruent ending word in order to examine whether the three preceding crowded words can be temporally integrated to form a semantic context so as to affect the processing of the ending word. Results from both behavioral (Experiment 1) and Event-Related Potential (Experiment 2 and 3) measures showed congruency effect in only the non-crowded condition, which does not support the existence of unconscious multi-word integration. Aside from four-word idioms, we also found that two-word (modifier + adjective combination) integration-the simplest kind of temporal semantic integration-did not occur in visual crowding (Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that integration of temporally separated words might require conscious awareness, at least under the timing conditions tested in the current study.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
authors.forename: Jifan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Neurobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chia-Lin
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Kuei-An
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yung-Hsuan
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Tien
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.|Neurobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Su-Ling
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Yeh
mesh_terms: D003243:Consciousness; D003441:Crowding; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception