Eye movements when reading implausible sentences: investigating potential structural influences on semantic integration.

ABSTRACT: The disruption that occurs in response to reading about implausible events in unambiguous sentences can be informative about the time course of semantic interpretation (e.g., Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Two eye-tracking studies used implausible sentences to investigate whether local factors like the structural relationships and the distance between words cueing a plausibility violation influence how quickly those words are integrated into a global semantic interpretation. Experiment 1 suggested that eye-movement disruption was unaffected by the number of words intervening between the words cueing the implausibility. Experiment 2 demonstrated that eye-movement disruption to implausibility occurred along the same time course regardless of whether the words cueing the implausibility were in a theta-assigning relation or not. These results suggest that these local structural factors do not influence how quickly new words are integrated into a semantic representation, but rather the global event representation determines the time course over which implausibility is detected.

SUBMITTER: Patson ND 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2891344 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature