RSVP with flankers - sentences with semantic and syntactic violations

Data collection took place at the NeuroCognition Laboratory (NCL) in San Diego, California under the supervision of Dr. Phillip Holcomb. This project followed the San Diego State University’s IRB guidelines. Participants sat in a comfortable chair in a darkened sound attenuated room throughout the experiment. They were given a keyboard for button pressing and wore a lightweight headset to record their verbal responses. They were instructed to watch the LCD video monitor that was at a viewing distance of 60 in (152 cm). Participants were presented with 180 sentences, the critical center word was presented in white New Courier font on a black background, while the flanker words on each side of the critical word were presented in a grey New Courier font. Words ranged from 1 - 14 letters long and sentences ranged from 6 – 12 words long. Words were presented with a height of 80 and width of 40, the fovea visual angle ranged from .75 – 6.21 degrees, with the largest peripheral visual angle of 15.18 degrees. Conditions consisted of 30 subject-verb agreement violations, 30 semantic violations, 30 double (subject-verb agreement + semantic) violations, 30 word-order violations, and 60 control (correct) sentences. Sentences were presented in an RSVP with flankers design, with three words presented at a time in the middle of the screen, each word appeared in the middle of the screen for a duration of 400ms before appearing to slide to the right and be replaced by the next word in the sentence. There was no ISI for this task to eliminate the words from appearing to flash at the participant instead of sliding.