Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

exploring sentence comprehension reaction time measurements were mainly used in
experiments designed to corroborate one of the sentence comprehension models (see next
chapter). In the studies that employ other methods, for example, event-related potentials,
reaction time is still used as a behavioral measure.
Reading time. Reading time is a similar measure; it usually takes the same kind of
equipment to measure it (a board with a button and a computer program). The
experiments using it usually employ a ‘button-pressing paradigm’ or ‘self-paced reading’
(Aaronson, Scarborough, 1976, Mitchell, Green, 1978, for review of the paradigms see
Just et al. 1982 and Mitchell, 2004). Subjects are presented with sentences or a text word
by word. They have to press the button to see the next word and they do it on their own
pace. There are several paradigms: a sentence or a text can be presented in a cumulative
way with the read word remaining on a screen, or in a non-cumulative way, a new word
replacing the old one. The time that is required for the completion of reading is calculated
between conditions that manipulate some aspect of sentence meaning. For example,
O’Brian et al. (1988) wanted to see when readers made anaphoric inferences, i.e. when
they drew inferences about what was not explicitly said in the presented text (e.g. if the
word ‘weapon’ in a paragraph about robbing a lady occurred in the first sentence, when
did the reader infer that it was, in fact, a knife? They showed that it happened
immediately).
Although cheap and easy to implement, reading time has two drawbacks: first, that it
generally slows down subject’s reading by the ‘artificial’ requirement of button-pushing;
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