Integrating the Spatial Semantics of Verbs and Prepositions during Sentence Processing

In order to understand the spatial meaning of an utterance, comprehenders must integrate the spatial semantics of verbs and prepositions. For example, the spatial interpretation of at is typically non-directional, simply specifying a location in space: in the sentence Amy ran at the track, at only specifies the location of the running event. However, in the phrase threw at, the inherent directionality of the verb threw coerces the meaning of at into specifying a bounded path along which a thrown object traveled, e.g., Amy threw the ball at me. We report reading time data that show a processing cost for this semantic coercion. The results show coercion effects for both verbs and prepositions, and support semantic theories in which directionality is built from simpler spatial representations.