Oculomotor and neural correlates of semantic and morphological priming in natural sentence reading

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWOur current understanding of visual word identification is difficult to extend to text reading-both experiments and theories focus primarily, if not exclusively, on out-of-context individual words. Here, we try to fill this gap by studying cross-word semantic and morphological priming within sentences in natural reading, in a novel coregistration paradigm with simultaneous recording of eye movements and electroencephalography. We report results from both eye tracking measures, and, more importantly, from Fixation-Related potentials, time-locked to the fixation onset on the target word. In both, semantic facilitation clearly emerged, while we observed no effect of morphological priming. These results may indicate that morphological agreement is at least partially computed outside of the lexical-semantic system which gives rise to semantic priming. These results provide new insight into the neural correlates of semantic and morphological priming in natural reading, revealing lexical dynamics as they likely emerge in our everyday reading experience.