TY - JOUR
T1 - Do readers misassign thematic roles? Evidence from a trailing boundary-change paradigm
AU - Christianson, Kiel
AU - Dempsey, Jack
AU - M. Deshaies, Sarah Elizabeth
AU - Tsiola, Anna
AU - Valderrama, Laura P.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1628347; Christianson). The authors wish to thank all the members of the EdPsych Psycholinguistics Lab at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology for assistance with data collection and cleaning, especially our dedicated and skilled crew of undergraduate students. Finally, we wish to thank anonymous reviewers and Michael Meng for invaluable comments and critiques during the peer review process.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - We report an eye-tracking experiment with a trailing boundary-change paradigm as people read subject- and object-relative clauses that were either plausible or implausible. We sought to determine whether readers sometime misassign thematic roles to arguments in implausible, noncanonical sentences. In some sentences, argument nouns were reversed after participants had read them. Thus, implausible noncanonical sentences like “The bird that the worm ate yesterday was small” changed to plausible “The worm that the bird ate was small.” If initial processing generates veridical representations, all changes should disrupt rereading, irrespective of plausibility or syntactic structure. Misinterpretation effects should only arise in offline comprehension. If misassignment of thematic roles occurs during initial processing, differences should be apparent in first-pass reading times, and rereading should be differentially affected by the direction of the text change. Results provide evidence that readers sometimes misassign roles during initial processing and sometimes fail to revise misassignments during rereading.
AB - We report an eye-tracking experiment with a trailing boundary-change paradigm as people read subject- and object-relative clauses that were either plausible or implausible. We sought to determine whether readers sometime misassign thematic roles to arguments in implausible, noncanonical sentences. In some sentences, argument nouns were reversed after participants had read them. Thus, implausible noncanonical sentences like “The bird that the worm ate yesterday was small” changed to plausible “The worm that the bird ate was small.” If initial processing generates veridical representations, all changes should disrupt rereading, irrespective of plausibility or syntactic structure. Misinterpretation effects should only arise in offline comprehension. If misassignment of thematic roles occurs during initial processing, differences should be apparent in first-pass reading times, and rereading should be differentially affected by the direction of the text change. Results provide evidence that readers sometimes misassign roles during initial processing and sometimes fail to revise misassignments during rereading.
KW - eye tracking
KW - good-enough theory
KW - language processing
KW - noncanonical sentences
KW - Thematic-role reversal errors
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85147653811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85147653811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2023.2171071
DO - 10.1080/23273798.2023.2171071
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85147653811
SN - 2327-3798
JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
ER -