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Poster E31, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall

How working memory capacity modulates the time course of semantic integration at sentence and discourse level

Xiaohong Yang1,2, Xiaoqing Li1,2, Jinfeng Ding1,2, Ying Zhang1,2, Qian Zhang1,2;1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, 2Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Language comprehension requires language users to integrate information from prior context. The one-step model of language comprehension argues that during comprehension, language users not only immediately integrate information from local sentence context, but also information from global discourse context. Underlying the one-step model is the immediacy assumption, according to which both sentence and discourse context will be immediately used to co-determine the interpretation of the message (Hagoort & van Berkum, 2007). In the present study, we test the immediacy assumption by examining whether the time course of these integration processes is constrained by language users’ working memory capacity. Sentence and discourse stimuli were constructed. For the sentence stimuli, each sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with its preceding sentence context. For the discourse stimuli, each discourse contained four sentences with a target word embedded at the final sentence and the target word was either congruent or incongruent with the information provided at the first sentence of the discourse. Participants of high and low working memory span (N=20 for each span group) were instructed to read for comprehension. Our results showed that while the high span readers showed the N400 and P600 effects to semantically incongruent words, the low span readers only showed the P600 effect. This pattern was found regardless of whether the incongruent words were placed at sentence or discourse context. These results suggest that the low span comprehenders were relatively slower than their high span counterparts in performing semantic integration at either sentence or discourse level. Thus, our findings support and also extend the one-step model by showing that while both sentence and discourse context are integrated in one-step, whether this step takes place immediately depends on language users’ working memory resources.

Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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