Abstract
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.
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Piñango, M.M., Zurif, E. & Jackendoff, R. Real-Time Processing Implications of Enriched Composition at the Syntax–Semantics Interface. J Psycholinguist Res 28, 395–414 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023241115818
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023241115818