Evidence for Self-Organized Sentence Processing: Local Coherence Effects

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that, at each point in time, the processor constructs an analysis which is consistent with the grammatical information in the input. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically incompatible with the current input can nevertheless temporarily influence the processor. Three self-paced reading experiments demonstrated the influence of such local structural ambiguities. The first examined the distracting effect of irrelevant Subject-Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase-Verb Phrase sequences (The coach chided the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second revealed an important role for semantics by manipulating semantic coherence in a variant of the first experiment. The third replicated the results in grammaticality judgments instead of reading times. We interpret the results as evidence for a self-organizing parsing mechanism.