Context Is Key: The Importance of Deep Reading Comprehension

Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people equally attend to the individual, carefully crafted sentences in our experiments as they would to more naturalistic discourses. There is increasing evidence, however, that the depth with which participants attend to single sentences is shallower than the deep style of comprehension that people use when reading longer narratives. This work has shown that the depth of comprehension has a vital impact on the cognitive operations involved in language comprehension, and on the resulting signals observable in electroencephalography (EEG), such as the N400 and P600 components. In this thesis, I present three studies: in the first, participants viewed sentences in a context where the detection of errors was important to their goal of understanding, and were instructed to either correct errors or repeat them verbatim to determine if the P600 is related to error correction processes. In the second, in order to determine if the P600 is directly tied to deep comprehension, I contrasted isolated non-naturalistic sentences with naturalistic discourses. Finally, I use these same naturalistic stimuli and collect predictability measures on every word to determine if lexical predictability interacts with frequency and semantic relatedness in naturalistic contexts. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]