The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…

Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In…

Past research on anaphor resolution has investigated the availability of discourse information related to characters that part and reunite. Upon reunion, distant concepts that have been associated with the characters before they separated become more accessible than they were just before the reunion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the…

This study investigates whether readers can generate predictive inferences that remain available to guide comprehension after a number of intervening sentences. The nature of the inference (detailed versus general) was also examined. In four experiments, participants read stories that suggested an inference. Reading time was measured to target…

Positive and negative quantifiers induce two very different perspectives in comprehenders--perspectives that have strong applications to rhetoric and communication. These are briefly reviewed. A potential mechanism, based on earlier work, is introduced, resting on the idea that negatively quantified sentences (like Not all of the boys went to the…