Local coherence effects are task sensitive: Evidence from event-related potentials in German

When the research question targets online measures of sentence processing, offline tasks are sometimes an afterthought in experimental design. The present study shows that offline tasks (acceptability judgments vs. comprehension questions) can modulate online processing. We investigated how the task shapes local coherence effects in German. Previous and present data using the same local coherence design in German was analyzed in a single model and it was found that P600 modulations due to local coherence were task sensitive. Previous work using acceptability judgments found a more positive P600 for a locally coherent condition compared to a control condition. In the present experiment using comprehension questions, the mean estimate of the difference between conditions was reduced to almost zero. The absence of a meaningful processing difficulty due to local coherence under questions is compatible with two opposing interpretations. One interpretation is that comprehension-driven reading enhanced grammar supervision, mostly preventing merely locally coherent parses from being considered. The alternative interpretation is that comprehension-driven reading induced good-enough processing. Good-enough processing might leave syntactic relations underspecified or parsing conflicts unresolved; as a result, the merely locally coherent parse competed less with the global parse, which eliminated the local coherence effect. Overall, our findings demonstrate that offline task demands can shape online syntactic processing.