What is the point of integration? The loci of knowledge-based facilitation in sentence processing

Abstract

When people read a text they must construct a representation of its essential ideas and integrate them. We investigated how world knowledge facilitates this process, and examined the loci of integration during sentence processing. In four experiments, we manipulated the relatedness of sentence-internal targets to preceding knowledge-based texts. In the first three experiments, no differences were observed in any sentence position except the sentence-final position. These results indicate that the integration of entire sentences with prior text is facilitated by active knowledge structures. Explanations in terms of associative priming, transitional probability, and the activation of anaphoric referents were ruled out. In Experiment 4 a difference was observed in the initial position between clearly unrelated control targets and knowledge-based targets. Two alternative accounts of the data are given: a sophisticated buffer model with a contextual checking mechanism, and an activation window model which is equivalent to a buffer with contextually sensitive access.