Register affects language comprehension: ERP evidence from article omission in newspaper headlines

Language processing involving syntax-discourse interface operations has been claimed to be particularly resource-consuming. In production, this additional complexity is claimed to be the source of article omission in the speech of young children and certain language-impaired speakers. In comprehension, article omission in some “special registers” (e.g., newspaper headlines) has been attributed to the trade-off between spending more processing resources and increasing processing speed. We investigated the comprehension of noun phrases (NPs) with and without articles (e.g., (a) policeman arrests (a) monk) when readers were or were not aware of reading headlines by recording electrophysiological responses. The presence of an N400-effect suggests first that comprehension of article-less NPs exerts processing demands and indicates that article omission does not result in costs from morphosyntactic processing (no LAN), but from linking processes at the syntax-discourse interface supported by discourse-semantic memory. Differences between the instruction modalities suggest that awareness of the special register plays a role. The electrophysiological data thus demonstrate that register has an effect on the discourse-semantic integration of NPs and provide evidence for a certain degree of top-down processing.