Tracking the dynamic word-by-word incremental reading through multimeasures.

Abstract

Reading relies on the incremental processes that occur across all words in a passage to build a global comprehension of the text. Factorial experimental designs are not well-suited to examine these incremental processes, which are influenced by multilevel factors in an overlapping manner. Exemplifying an alternative approach, we combined event-related potentials, probabilistic language models, authentic texts, and statistical methods to examine the time course of multilevel linguistic influences on the incremental processes which occur during reading each word. We found that indicators of the initial stages of word identification (N170 and P200) are sensitive to context-independent statistical information of a word, for example, word frequency. The later stages of word processing, involving processes related to meaning retrieval and integration (N400), heavily rely on the word's context-dependent information measured by word surprisal. Syntactic processing, reflected by a word's syntactic surprisal and the number of phrase structures it closes, was presented across multiple phases (an early negativity, N400, and a late positivity). Additionally, the effects of position factors at both the word and sentence levels emerged across multiple time windows (including N170, P200, and N400), suggesting their distinct influence beyond linguistic factors. These findings provide a theoretically coherent picture of incremental reading, partly convergent with conclusions from factorial studies but with novel results concerning the time courses and interactions of processing components. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).