The Influence of Paragraph Information on the Processing of Upcoming Words.

THREE EXPERIMENTS were performed to examine how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. We asked U.S. college students to read contextually constraining paragraphs and decide whether the final word was a word or not (lexical decision). The paragraphs included discourse-level information that was either consistent or inconsistent with the context of the sentence immedi-