There is little contact between theories of individual word identification and sentence processing models. In this talk, I present a study, led by Katarina Marjanovic and carried out in collaboration with Yamil Vidal, where we tried to bridge this gap by assessing cross-word priming during natural reading. By combining eye tracking and EEG, we found that cross-word semantic priming (“…the cat and the dog…” vs. “…the table and the dog…”) is solid and strong, both in eye tracking metrics and in Fixated-Related Potentials (FRPs). This is not the case for morphological priming (“…the cat and the dog…” vs. “…the cats and the dog…”), which doesn’t seem to emerge in sentence context.

Research on the neural underpinnings of linguistic representations has recently received a methodological boost with an approach that capitalises on the principle of neural entrainment by combining Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS) and electrophysiological recordings (e.g., Lochy, Van Belle, & Rossion, 2015).

A highly ecological ability such as reading is often investigated through non-ecological experimental paradigms. The present work aims at providing the community with an ecological tool for future research, a developmental database of eye movement measures during natural reading. Eye movements were recorded from a large sample of Italian developing readers (N=140), aged 8–11, as they read 12 multiline passages taken from story-books for children (1566 tokens and 762 distinct types). Eye-tracking data were also recorded from a group of skilled adult readers (N=33), for comparison.

On the one hand, inflectional morphology can encode semantic features, such as numerosity or sex; on the other, its has a functional role. The agreement of morphological features disambiguates the relations between constituents in sentence parsing, and reduces processing effort by favoring word predictions (Dye et al., 2017; Wicha et al., 2004). Ideally, those processes should be favored by consistency between form and features.