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The Influence of Globally Ungrammatical Local Syntactic Constraints on Real‐Time Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the Visual World Paradigm and Reading
Author(s) -
Kamide Yuki,
Kukona Anuenue
Publication year - 2018
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 - 10.1111/cogs.12694
Subject(s) - sentence , sentence processing , comprehension , reading (process) , linguistics , reading comprehension , cognitive psychology , computer science , syntax , psychology , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , philosophy
We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a carousel and motorbike while hearing sentences with noun phrase ( NP ) or verb phrase ( VP ) modifiers like “The girl who likes the man (from London/very much) will ride the carousel.” In both cases, “girl” and “ride” predicted carousel as the direct object; however, the locally coherent combination “the man from London will ride…” in NP cases alternatively predicted motorbike . During “ride,” local constraints, although ruled out by the global constraints, influenced prediction as strongly as global constraints: While motorbike was fixated less than carousel in VP cases, it was fixated as much as carousel in NP cases. In Experiment 2, these local constraints likewise slowed reading times. We discuss implications for theories of sentence processing.