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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 30, 2025

Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension

Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension

Published on: January 10, 2014

How readers process syntactic input depends on their goals.

Aaron Vandendaele¹, Mathieu Declerck², Jonathan Grainger³

¹Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.

Acta Psychologica

|January 20, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Reader goals shape syntactic processing. Focusing on sentence grammaticality enhances word categorization, demonstrating that syntactic constraints are active only during sentence processing, not isolated word analysis.

Keywords:

Flanker paradigm Reading Sentence processing Syntactic processing

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics
Neuroscience

Background:

Word recognition is influenced by surrounding words' syntactic compatibility (sentence-superiority effect).
Syntactic categorization of single words is affected by congruency, not compatibility, of surrounding words.
Reader's top-down goals influence how syntactic input is processed and how surrounding stimuli affect word recognition.

Purpose of the Study:

To directly test how reader goals modulate the influence of syntactic context on word processing.
To investigate whether sentence-level or word-level processing goals affect syntactic influence.

Main Methods:

Participants performed syntactic categorization tasks on single words within grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
A conditional task setup manipulated reader focus between sentence grammaticality judgments and single-word syntactic categorization.
Reader instructions varied emphasis on sentence-level grammaticality versus word-level categorization.

Main Results:

An interaction effect was found: grammatical correctness had a greater impact on syntactic categorization decisions than grammatical correctness alone.
A sentence-superiority effect was observed in single-word categorization, a novel finding.
This effect was absent in prior flanker studies, suggesting context dependency.

Conclusions:

Word-to-word syntactic constraints are active only when readers are engaged in sentence processing.
Reader goals critically determine the nature and extent of syntactic influences on word recognition and categorization.
The study highlights the dynamic interplay between top-down goals and bottom-up linguistic input in reading.