Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts

1. The main question: The nature of real-time semantic interpretation. The main question we will address in this talk is whether meaning representations of the kind that are pervasive in formal semantics are built up incrementally and predictively when language is used in real time, in much the same way that the real-time construction of syntactic representations has been argued to be (Steedman 2001, Lewis and Vasishth 2005, Lau 2009, Hale 2011 among many others). There is a significant amount of work in psycholinguistics on incremental interpretation (Hagoort et al. 2004, Pickering et al. 2006 among many others), but this research focuses on the processing of lexical semantic and syntactic representations, as well as the incremental integration of world knowledge into the language interpretation process. The processing of logical representations of the kind formal semanticists are interested in is much less studied. Similarly, the significant amount of work in natural language processing / understanding on incremental interpretation (Poesio 1994, Hough et al. 2015 among many others) usually discusses it from a formal and implementation perspective, and focuses much less on the cognitive aspects of processing semantic representations. (Steedman 2001 and related work is a notable exception.)