AUTOMATIC AND ATTENTIONAL PROCESSES IN THE EFFECTS OF SENTENCE CONTEXTS ON WORD RECOGNITION

An incomplete sentence context facilitated a subsequent lexical decision only when the test word was a highly likely completion of the sentence. Context had no effect on congruent but unlikely words, while it inhibited responses to anomalous words. The inhibition was eliminated in a control condition in which none of the test words meaningfully completed the context. In contrast, subjects could not eliminate the inhibition or the facilitation when they were instructed to ignore the implication of each context. It was concluded that contextual information in reading is typically used to focus attention on a class of responses which conserve the meaningfulness of the sentence, but that the deployment of attention will vary with the predictability of the material. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.