Rapid visual form-based processing of (some) grammatical features in parallel reading: An EEG study in English

Abstract

Theories of language processing - and typical experimental methodologies - emphasize the word-by-word processing of sentences. This paradigm is good for approximating speech or careful text reading, but arguably, not for the common, cursory glances used while reading short sentences (e.g., cellphone notifications, social media posts). How can we interpret a sentence in a single glance? In an electroencephalography (EEG) study, brain responses to grammatical sentences (the dogs chase a ball) presented for 200ms diverged from non-lexical consonant strings (thj rjxb zkhtb w lhct) [~]160ms post-sentence onset and from scrambled constructions (a dogs chase ball the) [~]250ms post-sentence onset, demonstrating - at different time points - rapid recognition and cursory analysis of linguistic stimuli. In the grammatical sentences, unigram probability correlated with EEG data [~]150-300ms post-sentence onset, and probability of the word given its context estimated by BERT correlated with EEG data after [~]700-800ms. EEG responses did not diverge between grammatical sentences and their counterparts with ungrammatical agreement (the dogs chases a ball), although EEG responses did diverge for plural vs. singular morphology at [~]200ms. These results suggest that at-a-glance reading is possible, based on coactivation of individual lexical items, morphological structures, and constituent structure at [~]200-300ms, but that words are not integrated into a coherent syntactic/semantic analysis, as evidenced by the substantially later responses to BERT probability and the absence of sensitivity to agreement errors.