A case in point is time. Its critical importance for language processing was never questioned; however, the timing of events – at a granularity relevant for psycholinguistics, let alone neurobiology – was very difficult to measure except via unnatural, disruptive probes. RTs are, by their nature, end state measures, unable to track moment by moment processing. Indeed, even online measures, such as self-paced reading and eye tracking, often showed reliable context effects only after several hundreds of milliseconds had passed by, in the “spill-over region”, one or more words beyond the word of interest. Psycholinguists thus devised elaborate paradigms, based on complex sets of assumptions, in an attempt to get at temporal aspects of language processing with RT measures; these included presenting stimuli for short durations or masking them to curtail processing, using relatively short SOAs to disclose “early” influences of one word on another (again based on the idea that processing of a stimulus is somehow arrested when a new stimulus is encountered, although see Van Petten 1993), or using response deadlines. Indeed, these procedures have become so much
