Sentence context processing has priority over constituent word processing(Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 26th Annual Meeting)

抄録

This study investigated the relationship between word and sentence context processing in the early stage of sentence reading. We examined the influence of sentence context on the perception of contextually anomalous words in a Japanese text. A target word (contextually anomalous two-kanji compound word or its contextually consistent counterpart) in a short text was briefly presented, followed by a four-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) recognition task. The recognition list consisted of four two-kanji compound words: contextually anomalous target word, consistent target word, anomalous new word, and consistent new word. The results showed that the participants recognized anomalous words less frequently than their correct counterparts, and they were more likely to select contextually consistent words. The context effect was obtained even when the participants possessed only information of content words in a sentence. These results demonstrate that processing sentence context has priority over processing each constituent word and that semantic information of content words plays a primary role in the early stage of Japanese sentence reading.