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Abstract:
While it is increasingly the case that experimenters
interested in the syntactically-driven properties of the language
processing system have been paying more heed to the possible
influence of meaning variables, there has been remarkably little
direct investigation of meaning effects. Specifically, there has
been little investigation of the nature of meaning effects outside
of the context of ambiguity resolution, and no clear indication,
where an incorrect syntactic parse is signalled by an implausible
interpretation, of the extent to which the resulting extended
processing time is a reflection of the interpretive process itself
rather than syntactic restructuring. To resolve such questions, it
is necessary to have a clearer understanding of both the syntactic
and the semantic processes and the interface between them.
This paper presents the results from a series of eye tracking
experiments investigating the effects of pragmatic plausibility on
the processing of sentences of a variety of structural types.
Contrary to a Fodorian Modularist position, the results show
extremely rapid and highly- localized influences of pragmatic
plausibility during sentence reading, even in syntactic contexts
which should present minimal interpretive difficulty. These effects
are shown not to be related to low-level lexical associative
processes, and in fact when lexical associations and structure are
pitted against one another, there are clear interpretive effects
driven by the structure, but no evidence of a lexical associative
influence. However, while effects of plausibility are found to
occur very rapidly across a variety of syntactic environments _
often showing up parafoveally, before the critical word is directly
inspected _ the exact nature of the readers response, together with
its timing and location, is modulated by the particular syntactic
environment. The results show that interpretive difficulties prompt
differing types of eye movement response depending upon the type of
syntactic structure and also the accessability and presence of
information that could be relevant to the interpetation _ even when
this is in fact not the case. However, while the precise
manifestation of the plausibility effect is modulated by the
syntactic environment, its magnitude does not interact with a
manipulation of syntactic (and interpretive) complexity. Its
distribution throughout a sentence is influenced by syntactic form,
but the overall magnitude of the plausibility effect remains the
same in simple and more complex structures. This finding, together
with other evidence that plausibility effects follow lower-level
structure building, suggests that the sentence processing mechanism
incorporates an interpretive device which is influenced by
probabilistic information derived from real world knowledge, but
that this follows and does not interact with on-going lexical and
syntactic processes.
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