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Tracking the Continuity of Language Comprehension: Computer Mouse Trajectories Suggest Parallel Syntactic Processing
Author(s) -
Farmer Thomas A.,
Cargill Sarah A.,
Hindy Nicholas C.,
Dale Rick,
Spivey Michael J.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1080/03640210701530797
Subject(s) - sentence processing , computer science , context (archaeology) , sentence , comprehension , natural language processing , interpretation (philosophy) , tracking (education) , parsing , artificial intelligence , domain (mathematical analysis) , speech recognition , psychology , mathematics , programming language , paleontology , pedagogy , mathematical analysis , biology
Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non‐ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x , y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing.