Abstract: The context effects in Chinese sentence reading comprehension was studied. The naming task was used via rapid serial visual representation with reaction time as index. The results indicated that the acting mechanism of context changes under different contextual conditions. With weak semantic association between the prime word and the target word,on the one hand, the modularities are independent of one another in the context which is lowly incongruent with the target word, i.e. the modularities are not influenced by other ones; on the other hand, the modularities are interactive when the context is highly incongruent with the target word, i.e. different contexts have different effects on lexical identification. With strong semantic association between the priming word and the target word, the context effect results from the associative priming, which proves the modularity theory

Key words: context effect, syntax, modularity theory, interactive theory