Sentence-Internal Interpretation: Limitations on Immediate Interpretation

Abstract

Nearly every psycholinguist believes that semantic interpretation of linguistic input takes place immediately (Bever & Townsend, 1979; Just & Carpenter, 1980; MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg, 1994; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980, for example). There is good reason for this belief. Numerous experimental studies indicate that the processing time associated with a word, for example, fixations on the word during reading, reflect the semantic predictability of the word in the particular context (see for example, Rayner & Duffy, 1986). Cross-modal priming studies show that activation from an inappropriate meaning of an ambiguous word is no longer present just a few hundred milliseconds after the offset of the word, (Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman & Bienkowski, 1982; Simpson, 1981; Swinney, 1979). In ambiguous sentences, a syntactically preferred analysis which is semantically anomalous (mend the sky) is immediately rejected, and more quickly revised than the same syntactic decision when it results in a sensible analysis (mend the sock), (Frazier, 1978; Pickering & Traxler, 1994).