Processing at Phrase Boundaries During Self-Paced Reading
- 1University of Alabama st Birmingham
Abstract
Sentence comprehension requires the incremental construction of syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. Prior neural work (Nelson et al., 2017) identified key neural events at major phrase boundaries during sentence comprehension. To investigate a behavioral correlation of these processes, we used self-paced reading to examine the impact of syntactic phase boundaries, semantic congruence, and sentence structure on sentence processing. Participants read object-relative, subject-relative, and canonical control sentences one word at a time and a subsequent comprehension task. Reading times were analyzed relative to phrase boundaries, node-closing operations, and semantic congruence. Object-relative sentences produced the greatest processing difficulty, demonstrated by increased reading times and decreased comprehension accuracy. Reading times peaked at the phrase boundaries, indicating that processing costs are tied to constituent completion rather than individual lexical categories. Reading times also increased with the number of syntactic constituents completed at a phrase boundary. Agent-patient semantic congruence produced its largest effects in object-relative sentences, suggesting that semantic information interacts with syntactic computations when processing demands are greatest. These findings demonstrate that self-paced reading is sensitive to the incremental processing associated with syntactic constituent completion. Processing costs are tied more closely to phrase completion than to individual lexical categories, scale with the amount of syntactic structure completed at a boundary and interact with agent-patient semantic interpretation during object-relative sentence comprehension. Together, these findings support a view of sentence comprehension in which syntactic structure building and semantic interpretation proceed incrementally and interact continuously throughout online language processing.
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BibTeX
@misc{hooper2026processing,
title = {{Processing at Phrase Boundaries During Self-Paced Reading}},
author = {J. Hooper and J. Dengler and N. Biondo and J. Odeh and P. Mudigonda and R. Kana and D. Basilico and M. J. Nelson},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.64898/2026.07.13.738177},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.13.738177v2},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Processing at Phrase Boundaries During Self-Paced Reading
AU - J. Hooper
AU - J. Dengler
AU - N. Biondo
AU - J. Odeh
AU - P. Mudigonda
AU - R. Kana
AU - D. Basilico
AU - M. J. Nelson
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/13
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.07.13.738177
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.13.738177v2
AB - Sentence comprehension requires the incremental construction of syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. Prior neural work (Nelson et al., 2017) identified key neural events at major phrase boundaries during sentence comprehension. To investigate a behavioral correlation of these processes, we used self-paced reading to examine the impact of syntactic phase boundaries, semantic congruence, and sentence structure on sentence processing. Participants read object-relative, subject-relative, and canonical control sentences one word at a time and a subsequent comprehension task. Reading times were analyzed relative to phrase boundaries, node-closing operations, and semantic congruence. Object-relative sentences produced the greatest processing difficulty, demonstrated by increased reading times and decreased comprehension accuracy. Reading times peaked at the phrase boundaries, indicating that processing costs are tied to constituent completion rather than individual lexical categories. Reading times also increased with the number of syntactic constituents completed at a phrase boundary. Agent-patient semantic congruence produced its largest effects in object-relative sentences, suggesting that semantic information interacts with syntactic computations when processing demands are greatest. These findings demonstrate that self-paced reading is sensitive to the incremental processing associated with syntactic constituent completion. Processing costs are tied more closely to phrase completion than to individual lexical categories, scale with the amount of syntactic structure completed at a boundary and interact with agent-patient semantic interpretation during object-relative sentence comprehension. Together, these findings support a view of sentence comprehension in which syntactic structure building and semantic interpretation proceed incrementally and interact continuously throughout online language processing.
ER -