The Psychological Reality of Local Coherences in Sentence Processing

Dynamical systems of language processing predict that sentence processing complexity is not only a function of the globally coherent structure ranging from the beginning of the sentence to its current point of processing, but also a function of locally coherent sub-parses. This paper presents an experiment that tests whether locally coherent, yet globally false continuations affect on-line anomaly detection times. The results indicate that they do interfere with processing, but only if the global analysis is not too demanding. This result can be seen as an indicator of the psychological reality of local coherence processing, and hence supports the dynamic system view on language processing.