The neural correlates of word position and lexical predictability during sentence reading: evidence from fixation-related fMRI

Sarah Schuster, Stefan Hawelka, Nicole Alexandra Himmelstoss, Fabio Richlan, Florian Hutzler*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

By means of combining eye-tracking and fMRI, the present study aimed to investigate aspects of higher linguistic processing during natural reading which were formerly hard to assess with traditional paradigms. Specifically, we investigated the haemodynamic effects of incremental sentence comprehension–as operationalised by word position–and its relation to context-based word-level effects of lexical predictability. We observed that an increasing amount of words being processed was associated with an increase in activation in the left posterior middle temporal and angular gyri. At the same time, left occipito-temporal regions showed a decrease in activation with increasing word position. Region of interest (ROI) analyses revealed differential effects of word position and predictability within dissociable parts of the semantic network–showing that it is expedient to consider these effects conjointly.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)613-624
Number of pages12
JournalLanguage, Cognition and Neuroscience
Volume35
Issue number5
Early online date10 Feb 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • eye movement control during reading
  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging
  • lexico-semantic processing
  • predictability
  • sentence processing

Fields of Science and Technology Classification 2012

  • 501 Psychology

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