Abstract: Researchers differ in their views on whether thematic and semantic information can possibly, affectinitial sentence processing. Three experiments were designed to explore this issue using a speciallydesigned moving-window technique. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when the background informationwas not obvious enough, no thematic effect was detected. In Experiment 2, when additional backgroundinformation was provided, the thematic effect was observed. Experiment 3 showed evidence thatsemantic information affected initial sentence processing.

Key words: thematic information, semantic information, moving window