Abstract
This study investigates how information congruency influences memory during sentence comprehension. Although previous research has shown that congruent information facilitates comprehension, it remains unclear whether this advantage arises already at the earliest stages of memory encoding. We addressed this question in four self-paced reading experiments in Czech, manipulating location congruency (congruent vs. incongruent), type of information targeted by the comprehension question (agent vs. location), and sentence position (initial vs. medial), and combining an immediate recall task with a delayed word recognition test. Across experiments, congruent locations were recalled more accurately than incongruent ones immediately after sentence processing, indicating a robust congruency advantage in early encoding outcomes. In contrast, delayed recognition showed no reliable congruency advantage, suggesting that the effect is primarily restricted to early encoding processes. If a piece of information is already encoded while the sentence is being read, it appears to be largely unaffected by congruency afterwards. Thus, incongruent information must pass a higher threshold to be encoded, but once it is successfully encoded, it is no longer disadvantaged.