Study title

England

Individual

The studied population included English native speakers from England. They were more than 18 years old, right-handed and had no language, neurological or psychiatric disorders. They were recruited via convienience sampling and consisted of predominantly university students and staff members.Experiment 1 presented text stimuli on a computer screen and collected behavioural responses (button presses) and EEG signals from the participant's scalp.Participants were seated in a sound-attenuated and electrically-shielded room to silently read a series of written stories. The experiment was run in OpenSesame (Mathôt, Schreij, & Theeuwes, 2012). The visual stimuli were presented on a grey background in a 30-pixel Sans font on a 24-inch monitor (120 Hz, 1024 × 768 resolution) approximately 100 cm from the participant.The experiments started with 5 filler trials to familiarise participants with the procedure, after which the remaining 120 critical trials and 55 filler trials were presented in a random order. Each trial began with the trial number for 1000 ms, followed by a fixation dot on the left side of the screen (where the text would start) for 500 ms. The story was then presented in five consecutive segments at the centre of the screen. Participants silently read each segment in their own time, and pressed the DOWN key on a keyboard to continue to the next segment. Of the five segments, the first three segments of each story described the story background. The 4th displayed the text preceding the speech quotation (e.g., After checking the upstairs rooms, Gareth bellowed:) and the 5th segment displayed the speech quotation (e.g., “It looks like there is nobody here!”). In about a third of the trials, a simple question (e.g., Was the house empty?) was presented to measure participants’ comprehension, which participants answered by pressing the LEFT (‘yes’) or RIGHT (‘no’) keys. Answering the question triggered the presentation of the next trial.Participants were given a short break every 20 trials, and there were 8 breaks in total. The experiment lasted approximately 45-60 min.EEG and EOG (ocular) activity was recorded with an analog passband of 0.16-100Hz and digitised at a sampling rate of 512Hz using a 64-channel Biosemi Active-Two system. The 64 scalp electrodes were mounted in an elastic electrode cap according to the international 10/20 system. Six external electrodes were used: two were placed on bilateral mastoids, two were placed above and below the right eye to measure vertical ocular activity (VEOG), and another two were placed next to the outer canthi of the eyes to record horizontal ocular activity (HEOG). Electrode-offset values were kept between -25mV and 25mV.Data collection method in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1, excepted that the experiment was conducted in an eye tracking lab. A SR-Research EyeLink 1000 eye tracker was used, running at 500Hz sampling rate. Viewing was binocular but only the right eye was tracked. A chin rest was applied to keep the viewing distance constant and to prevent strong head movements during reading. Button presses were recorded by the presentation software and participants' eye movements were recorded by the EyeLink 1000 eye tracker.