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Parafoveal and foveal N400 effects in natural sentence reading: Evidence from overlap-corrected fixation-related potentials

View ORCID ProfileNan Li, View ORCID ProfileSuiping Wang, Florian Kornrumpf, View ORCID ProfileWerner Sommer, View ORCID ProfileOlaf Dimigen
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.14.507765
Nan Li
1School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China
2Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China
3Center for Language Cognition and Assessment, Guangdong, China
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Suiping Wang
2Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China
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  • For correspondence: science@dimigen.de suipingscnu@gmail.com
Florian Kornrumpf
4Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
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Werner Sommer
4Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
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Olaf Dimigen
4Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
5Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
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  • For correspondence: science@dimigen.de suipingscnu@gmail.com
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ABSTRACT

The depth at which parafoveal words are processed during reading is an ongoing topic of debate. Recent studies using the RSVP-with-flanker paradigms have shown that a semantically implausible word in a sentence elicits a more negative N400 component than a plausible one already before the word enters foveal vision. While this finding suggests that word meaning can is accessed in parafoveal vision and used to rapidly update the sentence representation, evidence of similar effects in natural reading situations is still scarce. In the present study, we combined the co-registration of eye movements and EEG with the deconvolution modeling of fixation-related potentials (FRPs) to test whether semantic plausibility is processed parafoveally during natural Chinese sentence reading. For one target word per sentence, both its parafoveal and foveal plausibility were orthogonally manipulated using the boundary paradigm. Consistent with previous eye movement studies, we observed a delayed effect of parafoveal plausibility on fixation durations that only emerged on the foveal word. Crucially, in FRPs aligned to the pre-target fixation, a clear N400 effect emerged already based on parafoveal plausibility, with more negative voltages for implausible previews. Once participants fixated the target, we again observed an N400 effect of foveal plausibility. Interestingly, this foveal N400 effect was absent whenever the preview had been implausible, indicating that when a word’s (im)plausibility is processed in parafoveal vision, this information is not revised anymore upon direct fixation. Our results provide convergent neural and behavioral evidence for the parafoveal processing of semantic information in natural reading.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31700992 and No. 32171051) and a DAAD grant (91519070-57044645) to Florian Kornrumpf. An early version of the present results (without deconvolution modeling of overlapping potentials) was presented at the 16th International Conference on the Processing of East Asian Languages (ICPEAL 2016) in Guangzhou, China.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 17, 2022.
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Parafoveal and foveal N400 effects in natural sentence reading: Evidence from overlap-corrected fixation-related potentials
Nan Li, Suiping Wang, Florian Kornrumpf, Werner Sommer, Olaf Dimigen
bioRxiv 2022.09.14.507765; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.14.507765
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Parafoveal and foveal N400 effects in natural sentence reading: Evidence from overlap-corrected fixation-related potentials
Nan Li, Suiping Wang, Florian Kornrumpf, Werner Sommer, Olaf Dimigen
bioRxiv 2022.09.14.507765; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.14.507765

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