The influence of sentence constraint on the scope of facilitation for upcoming words

Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times.

“…As such, our findings furthermore reveal that in contextually constraining context, the language comprehension system can go beyond predicting the semantic features of upcoming words (Schwanenflugel & LaCount, 1988;Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1985;Schwanenflugel & White, 1991), an idea that has been used to explain the constraint-dependent N400 effects discussed in the introduction to this article (cf. Federmeier & Kutas, 1999aVan Petten et al, 1999).…”

“…. ., native speakers of English do not just generate a set of semantic features that include, say, small, rectangular, associated with gyms, holds clothes, and shutable (Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1985). Instead, or probably moreover, they actually predict the word locker.…”

Multiple effects of sentential constraint on word processing

“…2 The pattern of results for both the general and distributional ANOVAs reported in the prior paragraph were identical for 500-900 and 600-900 ms timewindows. (Schwanenflugel and LaCount, 1988;Schwanenflugel and Shoben, 1985). Constraint effects for these related, unexpected items on the N400 component of the ERP, in contrast, show the opposite pattern: N400 amplitudes are smaller for these items in strongly, as compared with weakly, constraining contexts (Federmeier and Kutas, 1999b).…”

“…Behavioral investigations, primarily using lexical decision tasks, have found that such effects are influenced by a number of factors, including the semantic similarity between the unexpected word and the best completion for that sentence and the context's constraint, e.g., the degree to which it narrows down the range of possible continuations. Schwanenflugel and her colleagues observed facilitation for the processing of unexpected endings related to an expected completion, but only when these items completed weakly constraining contexts (e.g., "She cleaned the dirt from her sandals," where "shoes" is the expected but low cloze probability ending) and not when they appeared in strongly constraining contexts (e.g., "On a hot summer's day, many people go to the lake," where "beach" is expected with high cloze probability) (Schwanenflugel and LaCount, 1988;Schwanenflugel and Shoben, 1985). These results have been interpreted as suggesting that strongly constraining contexts yield a narrower scope of activation than do weakly constraining contexts.…”

“…These results have been interpreted as suggesting that strongly constraining contexts yield a narrower scope of activation than do weakly constraining contexts. In particular, Schwanenflugel and her colleagues (Schwanenflugel and LaCount, 1988;Schwanenflugel and Shoben, 1985) have hypothesized that more constraining contexts establish a larger set of featural restrictions for possible upcoming words. Since, on their proposal, facilitation occurs only when the semantics of an incoming word matches on all of the featural descriptions established by the context, the greater number of featural restrictions exacted by strongly constraining contexts increases the probability of a mismatch and thus makes facilitation less likely.…”