Syntactic context e!ects in visual word recognition An MEG study

Words are typically encountered in the context of a sentence. Recent studies suggest that the contexts in which a word typically appears can a!ect the way it is recognized in isolation. We distinguish two types of context: collocational, involving speci"c lexical items, and syntactic, involving abstract syntactic structures. We investigate the e!ects of syntactic context using the distribution that verbs induce over the syntactic category of their complements (subcategorization frames). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data was recorded while participants performed a lexical decision task. Verbs with low-entropy subcategorization distributions, in which most of the probability mass is concentrated on a handful of syntactic categories, elicited increased activity in the le# anterior temporal lobe, a brain region associated with combinatory processing. Collocational context did not modulate neural activity, but had an e!ect on reaction times. $ese results indicate that both collocational and syntactic contextual factors a!ect word recognition, even in isolation.