The semantic relation between a verb and its argument rapidly impacts language comprehension much like world knowl-edge and the linguistic context (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Kutas & Hillyard, 1984; McRae et al., 1998). As part of thesocially situated context, register could incrementally modulate comprehension and interact with standard languageknowledge processing. Two self-paced reading experiments with an additional picture selection task examined howsocial-formality contexts and their (mis)matches with register use are comprehended in the presence of verb-argumentsemantic relation (mis)matches. We assessed whether comprehenders can rapidly adapt to shifting situation formality(Exp 2, N=64), or whether they benefit from habituation enabled by blocked presentation of formality (Exp 1, N=64). Wesuccessfully replicated incremental verb-argument (mis)match effects. No significant register effect was found, but theobserved picture selection accuracy patterns could be taken to suggest that the processing of social contextual informa-tion might impact late sentence processing.
