Early parafoveal semantic integration in natural reading

Abstract

While humans have a remarkable ability to read and comprehend text, the neuronal mechanisms supporting natural reading remain elusive. It is debated whether upcoming words in the parafovea are processed semantically. Here we show that the brain can indeed detect that a word is contextually implausible even before fixating on it. We demonstrated this by imperceivably flickering target words at 60 Hz that either were congruent or incongruent with the sentence context. While participants read these sentences, we used MEG to detect the flicker-response prior to saccades to the target words. We found a smaller tagging response for words that were incongruent with the sentence context; this reduction was related to the individual reading speed. We conclude that parafoveal semantic integration occurs during natural reading.