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Rapid extraction of structure from written sentences – investigating the contribution of lexico-semantic content and phrase structure using Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Martina Djordjijevic1, Marianne Hundt2, Alexis Hervais-Adelman1,2; 1University of Geneva, 2University of Zurich
Sentence comprehension is commonly characterized as an incremental compositional process in which lexical and structural information are dynamically integrated to construct meaning (Martin, 2020). Recent behavioral and neural findings using the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP) paradigm, in which all words are presented simultaneously for 200-300ms, suggest that readers can rapidly extract structural and semantic information from briefly presented sentences (Vandendaele & Grainger, 2025; Wen et al., 2021). Under these conditions, words embedded in sentences are more accurately and rapidly identified than words presented in linguistically unstructured or degraded sequences (e.g., word lists, non-word strings, or scrambled sentences), with neural responses demonstrating a divergence between compositional and non-compositional stimuli as early as ~130ms after stimulus onset (Dunagan et al., 2025; Fallon & Pylkkänen, 2024; Snell & Grainger, 2017; Wen et al., 2019). Mechanisms underlying the sentence superiority effect (SSE) are still debated (Flower & Pylkkänen, 2025), with current accounts generally proposing that rapidly available structural information contributes to the effect, although it remains unclear how much the effect depends on the presence of meaningful lexical content versus more broadly available structural and distributional regularities. The present study investigates whether the SSE persists under conditions in which lexico-semantic information is substantially reduced or absent, and thus the extent to which rapid sentence-level facilitation seen in SSE can be supported by preserved structural and distributional regularities. Using RPVP, we compare neural responses to canonical subject-verb-object [DET N]-V-[DET N] sentence frames in French, with those in which lexical fillers occupying subject, verb, or object positions are systemically replaced with pseudowords. The manipulation will create a continuum of fully lexicalized to fully pseudo-lexicalized sentences, allowing us to evaluate how incremental reductions in lexical content affect the SSE. While the overall sequence of elements and the phrase structure in the sentence frames is preserved across conditions, replacing lexical fillers with pseudowords reduces the availability of lexico-semantic and morphologically informative cues associated with agentive or patient related functions. Forty adult native speakers of French will undergo 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) recording while they perform a visual sentence matching task. The pseudoword conditions will allow us to examine how early neural responses to structured stimuli are modulated by reductions in lexico-semantic content under RPVP. Based on previous evidence for rapid sentence-level processing during RPVP, we expect all compositional conditions to elicit early neural differentiation relative to non-compositional control stimuli (consonant strings), with the magnitude and temporal profile of these effects varying as a function of the lexico-semantic information preserved within the stimulus. Comparisons between fully lexicalized, partially pseudo-lexicalized, and fully pseudo-lexicalized conditions will therefore help assess the extent to which rapid sentence-level facilitation can be maintained under reduced lexico-semantic availability. By comparing the amplitude and latency of neural responses across conditions, this study aims to characterize how different forms of linguistic organization contribute to sentence-level processing under highly time-constrained presentation conditions.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Reading