Effects of accelerated reading rate on syntactic processing of Hebrew sentences: Electrophysiological evidence

The present study was designed to investigate whether accelerated reading r ate influences the way adult readers process sentence components with diffe rent grammatical functions. Participants were 20 male native Hebrew-speakin g college students aged 18-27 years. The processing of normal word strings was examined during word-by-word reading of sentences having subject-verb-o bject (SVO) syntactic structure in self-paced and fast-paced conditions. In both reading conditions, the N100 (late positive) and P300 (late negative) event-related potential (ERP) components were sensitive to such internal p rocesses as recognition of words' syntactic functions. However, an accelera ted reading rate influenced the way in which readers processed these senten ce elements. In the self-paced condition, the predicate-centered (morpholog ically based) strategy was used, whereas in the fast-paced condition an app roach that was more like the word-order strategy was used. This new pattern was correlated with findings on the shortening of latency and the increasi ng of amplitudes in both N100 and P300 ERP components for most sentence ele ments. These changes seemed to be related to improved working memory functi oning and maximized attention.