Text type attribution modulates pre-stimulus alpha power in sentence reading

Prior knowledge and context-specific expectations influence the perception of sensory events, e.g., speech, as well as complex higher-order cognitive operations like text reading. Here, we focused on pre-stimulus neural activity during sentence reading to examine text type-dependent attentional bias in anticipation of written stimuli, capitalizing on the functional relevance of brain oscillations in the alpha (8–12 Hz) frequency range. Two sex- and age-matched groups of participants (n = 24 each) read identical sentences on a screen at a fixed per-constituent presentation rate while their electroencephalogram was recorded; the groups were differentially instructed to read “sentences” (genre…