Prior and new knowledge in language comprehension: Referent lifetime status versus biographical accomplishments

Knowledge about the real-world, fictional worlds, and well-known individuals is rapidly available during language processing, eliciting rapid processing costs when contradicted. Less is known about how effects of knowing famous personalities' lifetime status (dead or alive in a year) compare to effects of knowing their factual accomplishments (e.g., having starred in a movie) during language comprehension. Likewise, rapid processing costs ensue when short-term knowledge acquired through one-shot learning is contradicted. We ask whether such effects vary depending on whether knowledge of a famous referent is prior-held, recently learned, or absent. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments we investigated how world knowledge conveyed via photographs of well-known referents influences the processing of temporal (lifetime-year) and (referent-specific) factual knowledge (mis)matches. We distinguished whether people had the world knowledge, were trained on it and learned it new, or did not have it. In both experiments, congruence effects emerged in world-knowledge-present trials. In Experiment 1 (64 participants), lifetime-year and referent-fact congruence effects were elicited across measures, with nested congruence effects in total reading times in world-knowledge present, but not absent, trials. In Experiment 2 (32 participants), lifetime-year (but not referent-fact) congruence effects emerged with no significant differences between prior and newly-learned knowledge trials. These findings confirm that prior-held factual knowledge is rapidly available during processing. In addition, they provide novel evidence that both prior-held and newly-learned temporal (lifetime) knowledge influences comprehension, with implications for models of memory integration and the contribution of prior knowledge in language comprehension.