How Distance Affects Semantic Integration in Discourse: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials |
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| Authors: | Xiaohong Yang Chen Shuang Xuhai Chen Yufang Yang |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.; 2. Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Language Ability, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China.; 3. Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China.; 4. School of Psychology, Shannxi Normal University, Xi’an, China.; The University of Nottingham, UNITED KINGDOM, |
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| Abstract: | Event-related potentials were used to investigate whether semantic integration in discourse is influenced by the number of intervening sentences between the endpoints of integration. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with the information introduced in the first sentence. Furthermore, for the short discourses, the first and last sentence were intervened by only one sentence while for the long discourses, they were intervened by three sentences. We found that the incongruent words elicited an N400 effect for both the short and long discourses. However, a P600 effect was only observed for the long discourses, but not for the short ones. These results suggest that although readers can successfully integrate upcoming words into the existing discourse representation, the effort required for this integration process is modulated by the number of intervening sentences. Thus, discourse distance as measured by the number of intervening sentences should be taken as an important factor for semantic integration in discourse. |
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