Article

Unknown

10/2003;
Source: CiteSeer

ABSTRACT An eye-tracking experiment examined the on-line interpretation of complex expressions like heavy smoker. Preceding contexts biased the interpretation either towards a subsective (someone who smokes a lot) or an intersective interpretation (a smoker who weighs a lot). Results indicate that the global context does not completely override local preferences for how the expression would be interpreted on its own. These results constrain the notion of incrementality in sentence comprehension and suggest that strict incrementality, in which each word is immediately and fully interpreted as soon as it is encountered, cannot be maintained. Alternative theories and comparisons to existing research in other domains are discussed. Recent research has particularly emphasized the incremental nature of language comprehension. Since Marslen-Wilson (1973), evidence has accumulated that people generally semantically interpret sentence fragments as they are encountered (e.g., Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Ga...

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Keywords

Alternative theories
 
domains
 
heavy smoker
 
incremental nature
 
incrementality
 
intersective interpretation
 
language comprehension
 
local preferences
 
Marslen-Wilson
 
on-line interpretation
 
own
 
Preceding contexts
 
results constrain
 
sentence comprehension
 
strict incrementality