The effect of prior semantic context on lexical access during reading: An analysis of fixation time

Two experiments investigated the effect of a congruent sentence context on processing time for a target word. Subjects eye movements were monitored as they read sentences presented on a Cathode Ray Tube. Processing time on the target word, as measured by first fixation duration and gaze duration was shorter when the target was preceded by a congruent sentence context containing a noun and verb that were only weakly related to the target word than when it was preceded by a context in which either the noun or verb had been replaced by a more neutral word. In addition, the fully congruent contexts were modified to either preserve or disrupt the original syntactic relation between the noun and verb. No difference in processing time on the target was observed when these two conditions were compared to one another. These results replicate findings obtained by Duffy et al. (1989) using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation method to present the sentence contexts and naming time as the dependent measure and demonstrate that these effects generalize to normal silent reading. The observed facilitation for the full congruent contexts exceeded what could be accounted for by summation of activation from the individual lexical items contained in that context. However, there was no evidence that the syntactic relations among the items was critical to this effect. In a second eye movement experiment, lexical and message-level information in the sentence context were manipulated independently to explore potential sources of the facilitation. Evidence of facilitation from the message-level representation of the sentence context was obtained. These results, in conjunction with the previous results from the naming task are interpreted as support for an interactive view of lexical access