Effects of thematic and lexical priming on readers' eye movements

The study was inspired by Ehrlich & Rayner (1981). In the study semantic context effects were investigated during on-line discourse processing. Readers' eye movements were registered to see whether words that were semantically closely related to the global theme of the text were read faster than words that did not have any apparent semantic link to the discourse theme. In addition, lexical priming was examined by presenting an identity prime earlier in the text. The results showed that non-thematic words were regressed to more often than thematic words. Regressions were typically initiated after reaching a clause or sentence boundary. Regressions were thus assumed to be made in order to integrate non-thematic words into the previous context. Modest negative correlations were found between word's fixation time and its relative predictability. No effects of lexical priming were observed. It was concluded that moderately constraining discourse contexts produce negligible effects on word recognition.