Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Electrical brain potentials in response to violation of expectations in language processing have revealed that people usesentence context to facilitate word recognition and integration. Less is known about the interaction between the qualityof visual information in reading and the use of contextual information. In the current study we manipulated the visualfield (foveal vs. parafoveal) in which a sentence-final expected word, orthographic neighbor of an expected word, orunexpected word is presented and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the role of visual clarity. We findevidence that earlier stages of semantic retrieval indexed by the N400 are resilient to visual information presented at greatereccentricity, but that later, integration-related processes indexed by a posterior late positive complex (LPC) may depend onunambiguous, foveally presented visual information. These findings have implications for parafoveal processing duringnatural reading.