Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at the syntax-semantics interface.
This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion--in addition to syntactic composition--is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically transparent counterpart, a string that provides for an interpretable representation via syntactic composition alone. The prediction of a higher computational cost for this process is borne out by the results.
Piñango
M M
MM
Brandeis University, Waltham, M.A., USA.
Zurif
E
E
Jackendoff
R
R
D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*