We investigated the role that semantic constraint and participant control over stimulus presentation have on early stages of visual word recognition. Namely, we tested how the presence of a highly constraining sentential context influences the expectations that readers have during incremental sentence processing. Further, we tested whether allowing participants to self-pace the experiment affected early sensory perceptions of written stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in three experiments. Participants read sentences containing a target word from one of four conditions: 1) the target, spelled as expected; 2) the target with two internal characters transposed; 3) a nonword one vowel different from a target; or 4) an illegal consonant string. In Experiment 1, sentences were minimally constraining up to the target word (average cloze at target word: 0.01); in Experiments 2 and 3, sentences were highly constraining (average cloze at target word: 0.93). In both Experiments 1 and 2, sentences were presented using rapid-serial-visual presentation (RSVP). In Experiment 3, participants saw the same sentences used in Experiment 2 but were allowed to self-pace the presentation of each word in every trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, results showed early neural sensitivity to nonsensical consonant strings only, and only when they appeared within high constraint. In Experiment 3, results showed graded N170 effects to all target words containing unexpected visual information. P600 modulations were observed in all three experiments, indexing the difficulty of processing unexpected orthography, particularly in downstream, integrative processing. Results support a nuanced view of early visual processing, namely one arguing that visual processing is more fine-grained the more control participants have over how they read.

中文翻译：

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语义约束，阅读控制以及语义处理过程中基于表单的期望的粒度：来自ERP的证据。

我们研究了语义约束和参与者对刺激表现的控制在视觉单词识别的早期阶段所起的作用。即，我们测试了高度约束的句子上下文的存在如何影响读者在增量句子处理过程中的期望。此外，我们测试了允许参与者自定速度的实验是否会影响书面刺激的早期感官知觉。在三个实验中记录了事件相关电位（ERP）。参与者从以下四个条件之一中读取包含目标词的句子：1）目标，拼写正确；2）带有两个内部字符的目标；3）与目标不同的非单词一个元音；或4）非法的辅音字符串。在实验1中，句子最小限度地约束到目标词（目标词的平均结束度：0.01）；在实验2和3中，句子具有很高的约束力（目标单词的平均完形填空度为0.93）。在实验1和2中，句子都是使用快速序列视觉呈现（RSVP）呈现的。在实验3中，参与者看到了与实验2中使用的句子相同的句子，但被允许在每次试验中自动调整每个单词的出现速度。在实验1和2中，结果表明，早期神经仅对无意义的辅音弦具有敏感性，并且仅在它们出现在高约束范围内时才如此。在实验3中，结果显示，对所有包含意外视觉信息的目标单词，N170效果进行了分级。在所有三个实验中均观察到P600调制，从而记录了处理意外拼写的难度，特别是在下游的综合处理中。结果支持了对早期视觉处理的细微差别，即一种观点认为，参与者对阅读方式的控制越多，视觉处理的粒度就越细。