Lexical and message-level sentence context effects on fixation times in reading

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Understanding how readers process words in context is crucial for theories of language comprehension.
• Previous research has explored lexical access and semantic integration, but the interplay between different levels of representation remains an active area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of lexical and message-level semantic representations on the processing of individual words within a sentence.
• To examine how the relatedness of contextual words affects fixation durations on target nouns.

Main Methods:

• Eye movements of readers were recorded while they read sentences with target nouns.
• Experiment 1 manipulated the relatedness of subject nouns and verbs to the target noun.
• Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relatedness between the overall sentence meaning and the target word, keeping lexical content constant.

Main Results:

• Fixation durations on target nouns were shorter when contextual words were weakly related compared to neutral words (Experiment 1).
• Fixation times were reduced when the sentence context was semantically related to the target word (Experiment 2).
• Intralexical priming effects were observed between subject nouns and verbs.

Conclusions:

• Both lexical (word-level) and message-level (sentence-level) semantic information contribute to word recognition during reading.
• The findings support models where multiple levels of linguistic representation interact during sentence processing.
• Contextual relatedness, at both lexical and semantic levels, facilitates efficient word access.