Composition in context: Contextual effects on the online processing of eventive coercion
Final Report Abstract
The project investigated the role of contextual information on shifts in meaning during incremental compositional interpretation. The nature of contextual influences on compositional processes has been of central importance in long-lasting debates about the architecture of the semantics-pragmatics interface. As a starting point the project considered two alternative views on the nature of this interface: a) a modular account according to which sentence meaning is initially processed in isolation from pragmatic information, and b) an interactive account with semantic and pragmatic information percolating into the composition of complex meaning right from the start. The project applied a variety of psycho- and neurolinguistic methods such as eyetracking during reading, ERPs, behavioral methods and offline interpretation tasks in order to gain insights into the cognitive functions underlying incremental semantic interpretation in context and to decide between these theoretical alternatives. A first line of studies investigated the processing of aspectual coercion as in the girl sneezed for three minutes where a punctual event is (re-)analyzed as a series of events due to the semantic influence of a modifying durative adverbial. Previous research has commonly found these implicit shifts in meaning to incur processing cost. The project investigated whether appropriate discourse context can eliminate processing difficulty. Our eyetracking research showed that compositional processes are open to context information from the preceding discourse right from the first fixation of a coercing stimulus. Compositional adjustments due to coercion thus do not seem to be carried out encapsulated from the context supporting the interactive composition hypothesis. A second line of research investigated cross-modal influences of a visual context on the interpretation of natural language quantifiers such all triangles restricted by extraposed relative clauses. Dual-task and ERP experiments were conducted investigating the time course of quantifier interpretation in context. The interactive account was further subdivided into two theoretical options. According to the first account, contextual information is used strictly incrementally, but without proactively predicting possible continuations of the input. The second theoretical alternative assumes that context information is used proactively to predict how a yet incomplete semantic representation will develop further downstream the currently processed sentence. Our experiments provide empirical evidence for the latter account showing that incremental compositional semantic interpretation seems to be sensitive to the threat of semantic revision due to the visual context compositional interpretation makes reference to. Taken together, the project added new empirical evidence related to the semantics/pragmatics interface in support of the influential interactive account of incremental interpretation commonly assumed in psycholinguistics. Based on these empirical contributions the project developed formally precise models of the incrementally evolving representation of meaning in context.
Publications
- (2015). The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – An eyetracking study on the time-course of aspectual interpretation in German and Russian. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30 (7). S. 877-898
Oliver Bott & Anja Gattnar
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1029499) - (2016). Are all the triangles blue? ERP evidence for the incremental processing of German quantifier restriction. Language and Cognition 9 (4). S. 603-636
Petra Augurzky, Oliver Bott, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Rolf Ulrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2016.30) - (2016). Can semantic theories be tested experimentally? The case of aspectual coercion. In Joanna Blasczcak, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska and Krzysztof Migdalski (Hrsgr.): Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited: New Answers to old Questions. University of Chicago Press. S. 346-380
Oliver Bott
(See online at https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226363660.003.0010) - (2016). Processing Quantifiers: A psycholinguistic investigation. Unveröffentlichte, kumulative Habilitationsschrift, Philosophische Fakultät der Universität Tübingen
Oliver Bott
- (2017). Context reduces coercion costs - Evidence from eyetracking during reading. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. London: Computational Foundations of Cognition. S. 1654-1659
Oliver Bott
- (2017). Incremental generation of answers during the comprehension of questions with quantifiers. Cognition 166. S. 328- 343
Oliver Bott, Petra Augurzky, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Rolf Ulrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.023)
