Discourse comprehension is one of the most important means of information acquisition. It plays a very important role in our daily life. Being the core process of discourse comprehension, semantic integration has been a heated research topic for many years. However, previous studies focus mainly on the influence of non-linguistic factors, while the influence of discourse structure has been largely neglected. Being the main kind of discourse structure, topic structure plays an important role in the mental representation of a discourse. In this project, we will use EEG and fMRI techniques to investigate the influence of topic structure on semantic integration. First, we will manipulate the strength and times of topic shifts to investigate how the influence of topic structure on semantic integration changes with the patterns of topic structure. Then, we will test two possible cognitive mechanisms to explore why topic structure influence semantic integration. Finally, we will investigate the activations and cooperation of brain regions to identify the neural basis for the influence of topic structure on semantic integration. Through these studies, we will reveal the influence of topic structure on semantic integration. The findings can advance our understanding of semantic integration from interdisciplinary theories and promote the development of discourse comprehension research. Furthermore, the findings can provide some theoretical basis for the development of machine reading and information processing.
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