Harry Potter and the Chamber of What?: The impact of what individuals know on word processing during reading.

ABSTRACT: During reading, effects of contextual support indexed by N400-a brain potential sensitive to semantic activation/retrieval-amplitude are presumably mediated by comprehenders' world knowledge. Moreover, variability in knowledge may influence the contents, timing, and mechanisms of what is brought to mind during real-time sentence processing. Since it is infeasible to assess the entirety of each individual's knowledge, we investigated a limited domain-the narrative world of Harry Potter (HP). We recorded event-related brain potentials while participants read sentences ending in words more/less contextually supported. For sentences about HP, but not about general topics, contextual N400 effects were graded according to individual participants' HP knowledge. Our results not only confirm that c

SUBMITTER: Troyer M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7531766 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature