During comprehension, language users not only immediately integrate information from local sentence context, but also information from global discourse context for full understanding. In the present study, we examined whether the time course of these integration processes is constrained by language users' working memory capacity. Sentence and discourse stimuli were constructed. For the sentence stimuli, each sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with its preceding sentence context. For the discourse stimuli, each discourse contained four sentences with a target word embedded at the final sentence and the target word was either congruent or incongruent with the information provided at the first sentence of the discourse. Participants of high and low working memory span were instructed to read for comprehension. Our results showed that while the high span readers showed the N400 and P600 effects to semantically incongruent words, the low span readers only showed the P600 effect. This pattern was found regardless of whether the incongruent words were placed at sentence or discourse context. These results suggest that the low span readers are relatively delayed than the high span ones at both sentence- and discourse-level semantic integration and indicate that working memory functions have greater influence than context scope on the time course of semantic integration.

中文翻译：

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工作记忆容量如何在句子和语篇级别上调节语义整合的时间过程。

在理解过程中，语言用户不仅会立即整合来自本地句子上下文的信息，而且会整合来自全局话语上下文的信息以进行全面理解。在本研究中，我们检查了这些集成过程的时间过程是否受到语言用户的工作记忆容量的限制。构造句子和话语刺激。对于句子刺激，每个句子都包含一个与先前句子上下文一致或不一致的关键词。对于语篇刺激，每个语篇包含四个句子，在最后一个句子中嵌入目标词，并且该目标词与该词的第一句中提供的信息完全一致或不一致。高和低的工作记忆跨度的参与者被指示阅读以进行理解。我们的结果表明，虽然高跨度阅读器对语义不一致的单词显示N400和P600效果，而低跨度阅读器仅显示P600效果。无论是否将不一致的单词放在句子或话语上下文中，都可以找到这种模式。这些结果表明，在句子和语篇级别的语义整合中，低跨度的阅读器相对于高跨度的阅读器而言相对较慢，并且表明工作记忆功能对语义整合的时间过程的影响要大于上下文范围。无论是否将不一致的单词放在句子或话语上下文中，都可以找到这种模式。这些结果表明，在句子和语篇级别的语义整合中，低跨度的阅读器相对于高跨度的阅读器而言相对较慢，并且表明工作记忆功能对语义整合的时间过程的影响要大于上下文范围。无论是否将不一致的单词放在句子或话语上下文中，都可以找到这种模式。这些结果表明，在句子和语篇级别的语义整合中，低跨度的阅读器相对于高跨度的阅读器而言相对较慢，并且表明工作记忆功能对语义整合的时间过程的影响要大于上下文范围。