The extent to which higher-order representations can be extracted from more than one word in parallel remains an unresolved issue with theoretical import. Here, we used ERPs to investigate the timing with which semantic information is extracted from parafoveal words. Participants saw animal and non-animal targets paired with response congruent or incongruent flankers in a semantic categorization task. Animal targets elicited smaller amplitude negativities when they were paired with semantically related and response congruent animal flankers (e.g., wolf coyote wolf) compared to unrelated and response incongruent flankers (e.g., sock coyote sock) in the N400 window and a post-N400 window. We interpret the N400 effect in terms of facilitated processing from the joint activation of shared semantic features (e.g., animal, furry) across target and flanker words and the later effect in terms of post-lexical decision-making. Thus, semantic information can be extracted from flankers in parallel and impacts various stages of processing.

从多个单词中并行提取高阶表示的程度仍然是一个尚未解决的理论问题。在这里，我们使用 ERP 来研究从副中心凹词中提取语义信息的时间。参与者在语义分类任务中看到动物和非动物目标与响应一致或不一致的侧翼配对。与不相关和反应不一致的侧翼（例如，袜子土狼袜）相比，当动物目标与语义相关且反应一致的动物侧翼（例如，wolf coyote wolf）配对时，它们会引起较小幅度的负性) 在 N400 窗口和 N400 之后的窗口中。我们根据目标词和侧翼词之间共享语义特征（例如，动物、毛茸茸）的联合激活的促进处理以及后期词汇后决策的影响来解释 N400 效应。因此，语义信息可以从侧翼并行提取并影响处理的各个阶段。