Rayner, K., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2002). Language processing. In D. Medin (Volume Editor) Stevens
Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Third Edition: Volume 2, Memory and Cognitive
Processes (pp 261-316). New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Copyright John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
Language Comprehension
Keith Rayner and Charles Clifton, Jr.
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Correspondence to:
Keith Rayner
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
413-545-2175; rayner@psych.umass.edu
In this chapter, we discuss a number of important phenomenon with respect to language
comprehension. We must acknowledge that to completely review all aspects of language
processing would be a task that could hardly be accomplished in an entire book, let alone a single
chapter. So, undoubtedly we will leave out some peoples’ favorite topic in language processing
(for more detailed coverage see Garrod & Pickering, 1999; Gernsbacher, 1994). We will discuss
both reading and listening with an eye towards reviewing what is known about each domain.
The chapter consists of four main sections: (1) tasks and paradigms, (2) comprehending words,
(3) comprehending sentences, and (4) comprehending text. In the first section, we briefly
review the tasks and paradigms that have been used to study language processing. In each of the
remaining sections, we discuss (a) the nature of the task, (b) the core phenomena, and (c)
representations and models of the specific process.
Tasks and Paradigms
The goal of experimental psychologists who study language processing is to discover how
the complex processes of the mind operate when language is understood. To do so, a number of
tasks and paradigms have been developed to observe, record, interpret, and predict the activity of
the mind. In this section, we will discuss a number of such tasks and paradigms that have been
utilized to study language comprehension processes. Specifically, we will delineate how each
has been used to examine how people extract meaning from both written and spoken language.
Since most of these techniques have been shown to have both strengths and weaknesses, we will
also discuss some of the limitations inherent in various tasks (see Haberlandt, 1994 for a more
complete discussion of various tasks used to study language processing).
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Reaction time measures.
Reaction time measures are arguably the most common procedure for tapping into
comprehension processes, and psycholinguists generally use such measures to examine the
relative time-course of a process. Reaction time (RT) is defined as the interval between the
presentation of a stimulus and the onset of the subject’s subsequent response. This interval is
typically measured with a high degree of precision (e.g., in milliseconds), and response types
vary from simply naming the stimulus to making a more complex decision, such as deciding
whether two words are related in meaning to one another.
Naming, lexical decision, and categorization. In the naming task, subjects are asked to
articulate a word or a pronounceable nonword and reaction times are measured from the
presentation of the stimulus to the onset of the named response. By contrast, in the lexical
decision task, subjects must decide whether a letter string is a word (e.g., desk) or a nonword
(e.g., dosk), with reaction times measured from the presentation of the letter string to the onset of
the word/nonword response. A third task is categorization, in which subjects must judge whether
or not a given word belongs to some predetermined category (Is it a living thing?). For the most
part, in our discussions below, we will focus on results from naming and lexical decision since
these tasks have been used more frequently than categorization to study language processing.
In the past, the most popular usage of naming and lexical decision has been to determine
the time-course of visual word identification. For example, when factors such as word length
and syntactic class are controlled, naming and lexical decision times for high frequency (more
common) words are shorter than those for low frequency (less common) words. However, one
problem with such tasks is that overall response time is not simply a measure of word
3
identification, since both naming and lexical decision times also include the time it takes a
subject to formulate and initiate the appropriate response for the task (i.e., an articulation or a
manual button-press). Furthermore, it is not clear whether such responses even require the
subject to identify the stimulus. The naming task, for example, simply permits the subject to
pronounce a string of letters based upon grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules without
necessarily requiring that word meaning be accessed (e.g., most people can formulate a
pronunciation for blicket, although no corresponding meaning exists in the dictionary). Similarly,
in the lexical decision task, subjects may be able to judge whether a letter string is a word by
simply basing their decision on the familiarity of the letter string rather than on the actual
identification of the word. This does not necessarily mean that these tasks are insensitive to
semantic properties of words — quite the contrary, naming and lexical decision tasks have been
shown to exhibit effects of word frequency and familiarity, which would be unlikely unless some
aspect of word meaning was accessed. Despite these limitations, response times in these tasks
may be used to classify the upper limits of the time course for word recognition. However, many
researchers have used naming and lexical decision tasks in conjunction with other tasks to
determine whether the patterns of reaction times converge (see Taft, 1991).
Priming and masking. Two methodologies have emerged which are often used in
conjunction with naming and lexical decision. The priming paradigm (Meyer & Schvaneveldt,
1971) involves the presentation of a sequence of two words: a prime then a target. Subjects are
asked to make a decision regarding the target word, and how quickly they are able to respond is
measured. An early finding that emerged from priming studies is that when the prime is
semantically related to the target (e.g., dog followed by cat), subjects respond more quickly than
4
when the prime is not semantically related to the target (e.g., pen followed by cat). This indicates
that the relationship between prime and target words influences processing time on the target.
A second paradigm, masking, also examines word identification time by limiting the
exposure of a stimulus. For example, the word dog is presented for 60 ms (and then disappears)
and is replaced by a pattern mask consisting of either a series of x’s, random letters, or letter-like
shapes. Although reaction time is often measured in masking studies, the more common
procedure is to measure accuracy. As with many reaction time measures, the masking paradigm
has been useful in allowing researchers to examine the time course of lexical processing. Studies
utilizing masking techniques also suggest that subjects may extract information from words
which are presented for such a brief duration (e.g., less than 30 ms) that they are not aware of the
prime words identity (Balota, 1983; Marcel, 1983).
More recently, a paradigm which combines priming and masking procedures, masked
priming (Forster & Davis, 1984), has been used to shed light on the early stages of word
comprehension. In this paradigm, subjects look at a fixation target and a mask is presented
followed by the brief presentation of a prime word which is then followed by a target word
(presented for about 200 ms) which is in turn followed by another mask. Although subjects are
generally unable to identify the prime word, it still has an effect on their report of the target word.
Dual tasks and phoneme monitoring. The dual task paradigm is often used to study
attentional processes, and it follows two basic assumptions: (1) that subjects have a limited
processing capacity and (2) that different cognitive activities may make use of different
processing resources. For example, subjects may be asked to read sentences while listening for a
tone. If response times are slower when performing two tasks simultaneously as compared to
5
performing a single task (e.g., simply reading sentences), this would be evidence that both tasks
are drawing upon the same cognitive resources. Further, the rate of slowdown may also indicate
the degree of resource utilization.
One example of the dual task paradigm is phoneme monitoring. Most often, phoneme
monitoring is used to study speech comprehension, and it involves listening to auditorily
presented sentences while monitoring for a particular phoneme (e.g., to detect the /b/ sound while
listening to the sentence The emperor went to the royal baths.). Thus the two tasks are to
comprehend the sentence and to press a button when the target phoneme is detected. The idea is
that if contextual or lexical processing prior to the target word (e.g., baths in the example) is
difficult, it should take subjects longer to detect a target phoneme. For example, subjects are
slower to detect a phoneme when the target word is preceded by an ambiguous word.
Researchers utilizing this task are often interested in determining the basic units of speech
perception or in studying the processing complexity of sentence contexts, lexical ambiguity, and
attentional issues. However, the data emerging from phoneme monitoring tasks are often
affected by a number of extraneous variables such as the frequency of targets across sentence
stimuli, the discriminability of the phoneme, target word length, and the frequency of the target
word in which the to-be-detected phoneme is located.
Speed accuracy tradeoff. In addition to the dual task paradigm, another technique puts
subjects under various types of speed constraint. For example, one variation of the technique
involves training subjects to respond immediately upon the presentation of a signal that occurs at
various times after the end of a sentence. Accuracy of a decision made about a sentence
increases as the response deadline increases. The parameters of the function with which
6
accuracy increases as the response deadline increases can reveal information about processing
activities (McElree, 1993). The major concern with this technique is that it may induce strategies
that are specific to the demands of the task.
Processing time and other measures to assess comprehension.
The reaction time measures discussed above are most commonly used when the unit of
interest is a single stimulus (e.g., a word). Researchers interested in examining readers’
comprehension of larger units, such as sentences or sentence phrases, use one of a variety of
processing time methodologies. By manipulating characteristics of the text, researchers can infer
selected attributes of comprehension processes. In these tasks, subjects may be asked to read a
paragraph or sentence while elapsed reading times are recorded (so that paragraph reading time
or sentence reading time is measured). Similarly, subjects may be given a limited amount of time
to read a portion of text while error rates are recorded.
Self-paced reading and listening. Sometimes, if an experimenter is interested in how
long it takes a subject to read a particular segment of text, measuring overall reading times for
sentences or paragraphs may be too imprecise. In the self-paced reading task, the experimenter
controls the amount of text that the subject can see at any one time, and the size of the segment
(e.g., a word or a phrase) available to the subject is generally a function of the topic under
investigation. When the subject has finished reading one segment, s/he pushes a button and the
next segment of text is presented. When only one word at a time is presented, this procedure
yields a processing time measure for each word in the text (Just, Carpenter, & Woolley, 1982).
A variation of this task is called the "stops making sense" task, in which subjects advance wordby-word through a sentence as long as it makes sense; when the sentence no longer makes sense,
7
or becomes ungrammatical, subjects push a different button (Boland, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey,
1990).
One problem with the self-paced reading task is that it does not mimic natural reading.
Reading times in the self-paced reading paradigm are slower (about half as fast) than those in
more natural reading tasks since subjects must press a button to read subsequent segments of
text. Since it takes longer to manually press a button than it does to move the eyes, words stay on
the screen for about 400 ms in this task, as compared to average eye fixation times of
approximately 250 ms in natural reading. Given that reading in the self-paced paradigm is
slower in general, one possibility is that subjects may develop different comprehension strategies.
More recently, self-paced listening paradigms (Ferreira, Henderson, Anes, Weeks, &
McFarlane, 1996) have been developed to study speech perception. Just as in the reading
situation, the listener pushes a button to get the next word or segment of discourse. Similar
concerns regarding strategic effects also apply to this paradigm.
RSVP. Natural silent reading involves moving the eyes to successive segments of
text—hence the reader controls how quickly text is read. By contrast, in the rapid serial visual
presentation (RSVP) task (Potter, Kroll, & Harris, 1980), the experimenter controls the rate at
which text is presented. In this paradigm, the subject sits in front of a computer screen while
new words are presented one at a time for various durations (e.g., 50 to 400 ms). Studies
utilizing this technique have found that readers can comprehend short passages of text which are
presented at rates of up to 1,200 words per minute, with a new word being presented every 50
ms. Interestingly, when each word is presented for 250 ms, reading comprehension in the RSVP
8
task is often better than in natural reading. However, this paradigm has critical limitations.
Although comprehension performance is high for short passages of text, as the amount of text
increases, comprehension begins to suffer (Masson, 1983). This is partially because RSVP
reading prevents readers from looking back at “misunderstood” portions of text (during normal
reading, readers make move their eyes back to previously read text on approximately 10% of all
eye fixations). Moreover, RSVP reading is also mentally taxing for subjects, as it requires their
constant attention to text.
Phoneme restoration. The self-paced reading and RSVP tasks described are generally
utilized to measure higher-order cognitive comprehension processes in reading. In contrast, the
phoneme restoration effect has most commonly been used to measure lower-order, perceptual
processing in listening. The phoneme restoration effect is an auditory illusion that arises when
part of an utterance is replaced by an extraneous sound such as a cough or white noise. In such
instances, listeners often perceptually fill in (restore) the missing phoneme and report that they
heard the complete utterance (Warren, 1970). Early studies using this method found that
psychoacoustic factors related to the nature of the replacement sound (e.g., amplitude and
quality) affected the probability of detecting the missing phoneme (Warren & Obusek, 1971).
Subsequent studies have used the restoration effect to examine the extent to which lexical and
higher-level representations can influence speech perception (Samuel, 1981, 1996). Samuel
(1996) notes that, while effects emerging from the phoneme restoration paradigm are real, the
paradigm is sensitive to small changes in methodology, e.g., differences in the syllabic length of
the carrier word, the phonological class of the replaced segment, and the quality of the replacing
sound.
9
Eye movements
With the continuing development of technological innovations, some researchers have
begun to replace or supplant reaction time and processing time paradigms with eye movement
measures. In a typical eye-tracking experiment, subjects read sentences presented on a computer
monitor while their eye movements are recorded. Researchers then look at patterns of readers’
eye movements noting, for example, how long readers’ eyes remain fixated on words or phrases
within sentences, how far their eyes move from fixation to fixation, or how frequently their eyes
regress back to re-read text.
Eye movements have been utilized to study a variety of language comprehension
processes, and data gleaned from eye-tracking studies have been found to reflect moment-tomoment cognitive processes. One early finding was that where readers look and how long they
look there is directly related to the ease or difficulty of cognitive processing (see Rayner, 1978,
1998). For example, when extraneous factors are controlled, fixation times are longer for lower
frequency words, which are less likely to be encountered during reading, as compared to higher
frequency words, which are more likely to be encountered. Eye movements have also been used
to examine the effects of lexical ambiguity, morphological complexity, discourse processing,
semantic relatedness, phonological processing, syntactic disambiguation, and the perceptual span
(see Rayner, 1998; Rayner & Sereno, 1994, for reviews).
Eye-movement contingent display changes. A number of methods have emerged
within the eye-tracking paradigm including the development of the eye-movement contingent
display change paradigm (see Figure 1). In this paradigm, text displayed on a computer screen is
manipulated as a function of where the eyes are fixated. As readers’ eyes move across a line of
10
text, letters or words may be modified in foveal, parafoveal, or peripheral locations, thus
allowing the experimenter to control the nature and amount of information available to the
reader. One variation of the eye-movement contingent paradigm is the moving window
paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner & Bertera, 1979). In this paradigm, as readers
move their eyes across the text, upon each fixation, text is exposed within an experimenter
defined “window” while all text outside of the window is altered in some way (e.g., all of letters
might be replaced by X’s). Wherever the reader looks, the text within the window is available.
The logic of the paradigm is that when the window is as large as the region from which
information can normally be obtained, reading will proceed as smoothly as when there is no
window (normal text). Using this technique, the size of the perceptual span in reading has been
determined.
Insert Figure 1 about here
Another variation is the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), in which characteristics of a
target word in a particular location within a sentence may be manipulated. For example, in the
sentence John composed a new tune for the children, when readers’ eyes move past the space
between new and tune, the target word tune would change to song. In this manner, researchers
can examine the types of information (e.g., orthographic, phonological, semantic) that readers
obtained from the target word prior to fixating upon it. Indeed, readers do process a target word
more quickly (preview benefit) when they have had a preview of that word.
A final variation is the fast-priming paradigm (Sereno & Rayner, 1992), in which a prime
word is briefly presented for a very short duration (i.e., less than 50 ms) and is immediately
replaced by a target word. Primes may be related in meaning to target words (tune-song), but
11
they may also be phonologically related (e.g., bat-cat) or orthographically related (e.g., benchbeach). This paradigm has been used to examine the time course of word processing. An
advantage of using eye-movement measures over reaction time and processing time measures is
that they allow researchers to study comprehension processes in a more natural setting. As
mentioned previously, one disadvantage of reaction time and processing time measures is that
they may result in the formulation of task-specific strategies or may simply slow the reading
process. In the eye-movement paradigm, readers are free to read text as they would during
normal reading. Moreover, eye movement measures are flexible, allowing researchers to
examine both fine-grain and coarse-grain language comprehension processes.
Eye movements and listening. Eye movement recording techniques have also been
utilized in the context of speech understanding. It has been demonstrated that when subjects
listen to a narrative while a scene is presented in front of them which depicts objects in the
narrative, their eyes tend to move to those objects that are mentioned in the narrative. This
technique, often called the head-mounted eyetracking technique, allows researchers to make
inferences about on-line speech comprehension (Tanenhaus & Spivey-Knowlton, 1996).
Physiological measures
In the past 20 years, a number of physiological measures have been developed to study
cognitive processes. These measures range from simply recording heart rate to recording more
complex physiological activity, such as measuring changes in brain activity. It is hoped that by
using such measures, researchers will be able to accomplish two major goals: (1) to locate
language comprehension regions (or pathways) in the brain and (2) to more closely examine the
time course of cognitive activity within the brain. Although there are many physiological
12
measures, in this section, we will focus only on those measures which involve examining activity
in the brain (see Gazzaniga, 2000 for a more complete review of physiological measures).
ERP. Among the most common physiological measures used today is the event-related
potential or ERP (Kutas & Van Petten, 1994) which involves measuring electrical events in the
brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. By averaging electrical potentials over a number of
trials, researchers hope to time-lock brain activity to a particular sensory event (e.g., the
presentation of a word stimulus). The voltages associated with brain activity vary in both
polarity and magnitude over time, resulting in a series of electrical “peaks and valleys”. For
example, when subjects are presented with a semantic incongruity, a relatively large negative
potential (i.e., a valley) occurs about 400 ms after the presentation of the stimulus (this is termed
a N400 wave).
One advantage of using ERP’s over other methodologies is that they allow experimenters
to more directly examine the time course of language comprehension processes within the brain
itself. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the ERP activity being measured is the direct
result of a particular cognitive process, as opposed to being the result of later (e.g., memory)
processing. While ERPs have very good temporal resolution, much of the research has focused
on late occurring waves. One problem here for reading is that since various effects occur within
250 ms (as evidenced by eye movement data), the events reflected in the late occurring ERP
signal take place after the relevant processing activities have occurred. So, if a certain effect
shows up during an eye fixation (less than 250-300 ms), examining the same effect in the N400
doesn’t seem to provide direct information about the time course of the effect (Raney & Rayner,
1993; Sereno & Rayner, 2000a). Thus, it may be worthwhile to examine earlier occurring ERP
13
waves than has typically been the case (Sereno, Rayner, & Posner, 1999).
PET. Positron-emission tomography (PET) scans (Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintum, &
Raichle, 1989) are based on a different framework than ERP’s. This method involves the
ingestion of a small amount of radioactive material which may be traced and used to measure
blood flow in the brain; cognitive activity is indexed by changes in blood flow to active parts of
the brain. Studies using PET scans have found that many different parts of the brain are involved
in language comprehension (including parts of the left temporal, parietal, and frontal cortex).
This complexity is perhaps the greatest disadvantage to the PET methodology. It is not
surprising that language comprehension involves the coordination of a number of brain systems,
but the metabolic activity measured by PET scans may also reflect additional processing not
directly related to language. For example, researchers have found increased metabolic activity in
brain systems which are not specific to language processing per se. Specifically, studies
examining reading processes have found increased metabolic activity in the anterior cingulate
cortex, which is normally associated with sustained attentional processing, as well as in the
contralateral cerebellum, which is thought to be involved in the rapid shifting of attention.
MRI/fMRI. Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, and its newest counterpart, functional
magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI (Buckner, 1998), are based on framework similar to that of a
PET scan—namely, that sensory, motor, and cognitive tasks produce a localized increase in
neural activity which gives rise to subsequent increases in blood flow. In very general terms,
MRI is based upon how cells that are relatively rich or poor in oxygen respond to a magnetic
field; fMRI reflects in changes in blood flow while a subject is engaged in a cognitive task.
Researchers utilizing MRI technology to examine language processes are typically interested in
14
localizing language comprehension functions in the brain. For example, in a baseline condition
an experimenter may present subjects with a word and simply require the subject to look at the
word. In another condition, subjects may be asked to decide whether the word represents a living
thing. Differences in neural activity between the two conditions can then be used to determine
the region in the brain used in processing aspects of word meaning.
One advantage of the MRI/fMRI paradigm is that it is relatively non-invasive and
represents little health risk to subjects (as opposed to PET scans which involve the ingestion of
potentially harmful radioactive materials). In addition, they permit the experimenter to collect
hundreds (or even thousands) of images from a single subject, with highly accurate spatial
resolution. MRI technology is also becoming increasingly available to psycholinguists, as many
hospitals have MRI facilities.
The MRI/fMRI paradigm also suffers from several disadvantages. The most significant
limitation is that temporal resolution is relatively poor (e.g., although it may only take about 250
ms to recognize a word, an fMRI can only acquire data in about 2-3 seconds), thus disallowing
any clear examination of the time course of language processing. However, some scientists have
also begun to combine the temporal resolution of ERPs with the spatial resolution of fMRI’s. In
addition, as mentioned earlier in reference to PET scans, a great deal of activity in the brain
occurs which is only indirectly related to language functions, resulting in some degree of
difficulty in localizing areas in the brain specific to language comprehension.
We have presented the physiological based methods for the sake of completeness.
However, the bulk of the research discussed in this chapter comes from methodologies and
paradigms other than the brain imaging methods (e.g., PET and fMRI). The reason for this is
15
quite simple - research on language comprehension using brain imaging is only in its infancy and
at this point there are very few imaging studies that really elucidate our understanding of
language processing. To be sure, such techniques have revealed a great deal about which brain
regions are active during various types of language processing, just not that much about
processing per se.. However, we expect that in the near future many such studies will appear.
Word Recognition
The nature of the task
Clearly, recognizing the individual words in texts and discourse represents the first stage
for understanding language. Some would undoubtedly argue that grapheme (letter) or phoneme
(the smallest sound unit) recognition, as well as morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit)
recognition necessarily must precede word recognition and there have been lively research efforts
in pursuit of understanding the recognition of these three units. However, given space
limitations, we will focus first on the word before moving to sentence and discourse
comprehension.
Considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how words are recognized during
reading and listening. If language comprehension consisted only of recognizing individual
words, the task for researchers interesting how language is understood would be considerably
easier than it is. But, words do not occur in isolation and exactly how individual words are
integrated into a discourse representation is an interesting question. Much of the research on
visual word recognition has focused on how readers access the meaning of a word. In traditional
models of word recognition, meanings of words are represented in the reader’s lexicon (or mental
dictionary where information about a word, such as its meaning is stored). In these models (Fig
16
2), there are two pathways, one from graphemic units to meaning directly, and one from
graphemic units to phonological units, and then to meaning (the phonological mediation
pathway). In this Dual Route Model (Coltheart, 1978; Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993,
Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001), the direct pathway can be used for words
that become highly familiar and must be used to read so called “exception words” (e.g., café) for
which an indirect phonological route would fail. And the phonological route must be used to
read pseudowords (e.g. nufe) for which there is no lexical representation to access. These issues
of mediation and one-or-two routes are central points of contrast between traditional
representational models and more recent alternative theoretical models.
Insert Figure 2 about here
These alternative models share the idea that words are not represented in a mental
lexicon, but rather emerge from processing activity. Connectionist models (Fig 3) are
nonrepresentational in that they assume that words emerge from patterns of parallel and
distributed activation (Harm & Seidenberg,1999; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson,
1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). Resonance models are also nonrepresentational,
claiming that word identification results from the stabilization of dynamic patterns that are
continuously modified by interactions among inputs and various dynamic states resulting from
prior experience (Stone & Van Orden, 1994;Van Orden & Goldinger,1994). An interesting
feature of this model is that patterns of graphic-phonological activation stabilize more rapidly
than do patterns of graphic-semantic activation. In effect, a word form is identified primarily
through the convergence of orthography and phonology. Meaning is slower to exert an influence
on the identification process.
17
Insert Figure 3 about here
These contrasting approaches to cognitive architectures have been central in word
recognition research in recent years. Although there may not be enough data for deciding
between representational and nonrepresentational models (e.g. Besner, Twilley, McCann, &
Seergobin, 1990; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Coltheart, et al, 1990), both classes of models
can account for many of the same results. Most models of word identification have not generally
been sensitive to the linguistic structure of words. In both representational and
nonrepresentational models, a letter string has usually been treated like any other stimulus. And
its spoken language counterpart, to which the graphic stimulus must be connected, has been
treated like any other associated response. One recent model, however, specifies a functional
internal linguistic structure during the word identification process. In this Two-cycles model
(Berent & Perfetti, 1995), vowels and consonant phonemes are assembled separately from a
graphic input. Experiments using masking and a variation of the fast priming paradigm have
demonstrated that, in English, consonants are assembled more quickly than vowels (Berent &
Perfetti, 1995; Lee, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2001). This separation of vowels and consonants can
arise either from fundamental phonological considerations or from the fact that, in English at
least, the grapheme-phoneme mapping is more reliable for consonants than for vowels.
In this section, we will discuss visual and auditory word recognition, and focus on some
issues that have received the attention in the literature. Due to space limitations, we will not
discuss some important topics, such as neighborhood effects (Andrews, 1997) and cross
linguistic studies (Frost, 1998; Lukatela & Turvey, 1998). We will begin by discussing some
relations between visual and auditory word recognition. Then, we discuss two topics which have
18
received considerable attention in the visual word identification literature. First, we discuss
whether visual word identification is a letter by letter or parallel process. Second, we discuss the
extent to which sound codes are involved in visual word identification. Following our discussion
of these topics, we turn to discussions of frequency effects, context effects, and ambiguity
effects.
Visual and auditory word recognition
We start with the basic assumption that at some level of the processing system, input
from the eyes and from the ears converge on a central processing system. However, listening and
reading also differ in seemingly fundamental ways. In listening, the information speech provides
about what words are being uttered is spread over time. Identification of a heard word is a serial
process, in which information arriving at the beginning of the word is used earlier, and
differently, than information arriving later in the word (Cutler, Dahan, & Van Donselaar, 1997;
Cutler & Clifton, 2000). In written language, information is spread over space, not over time.
Reading, though based upon auditory language, permits a substantial amount of parallel
processing of the visual word form. The eyes land on a word and apparently acquire information
from various parts of a word in parallel (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). Some serial processing is
induced by multiple fixations made on a word, but the visual word recognition process seems to
be primarily a parallel process (see the following section for further discussion).
This apparently-fundamental difference between reading and listening has led to the
development of quite different models of visual and auditory word recognition. Models of visual
word recognition concentrate on questions like whether or not distinct representations (e.g.,
visual and phonological) are computed in the process of word recognition and on how different
19
sources of information (visual, lexical, contextual, etc.) are integrated. In contrast, most current
models of auditory word recognition have the flavor of Marslen-Wilson’s Cohort model
(Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978). A listener activates an initial set, or cohort, of words that are
consistent with the beginning segments of an auditory word. This cohort is reduced by
information from later segments and by competition between the members of the cohort,
hopefully resulting in the recognition of a single word. There is substantial debate about whether
top-down feedback from the lexicon guides perception of individual speech sounds (the TRACE
model of McClelland & Elman, 1986 claims it does; the MERGE model of Norris, McQueen, &
Cutler, 2000, claims it does not). What is clear is that multiple candidate words are activated
during the process of recognition: Words that are embedded within a spoken word or overlap
with it are momentarily activated.
This multiple activation brings up the question of how the beginning and end of a word is
identified. This is a non-problem in reading, at least in languages that are written like English:
Words are separated by spaces, and readers use these spaces (Rayner, 1998). But in listening,
there are no spaces. Words run into one another, more or less seamlessly. It appears that the form
of language provides some cues to the starts of words. For instance, languages generally have
phonotactic constraints on what sequences of segments can occur together in a word. Violating
these constraints means that a word boundary has been crossed. Further, some languages provide
useful prosodic cues to the beginnings of words. English content words, for example, tend to
begin with a strong syllable, and listeners seem to treat the occurrence of a strong syllable as
evidence that a new word may have begun (see Cutler et al., 1997). Beyond formal cues to the
segmentation of words from the speech stream, it appears that success in recognizing a word is
20
an important signal in dividing the speech stream into words (Cutler & Clifton, 2000). For
instance, possible words like stay, steak, and take may be activated during the perception of the
string first acre, but eventually success in exhaustively assigning the auditory signal to these two
words will inhibit the competing overlapping words.
One problem that is common to both listening and reading is determining the nature of
the lexical entry that is contacted by an auditory or a visual word. A major point of theoretical
dispute is whether the representation that is stored in the lexicon consists of a stem together with
information about its possible affixes (so, for example, a lexical entry would be read together
with information about the possible affixes re-, -er, -ing-, etc.) vs. a full form (e.g. reading)
together with links to related full forms. Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older (1994)
propose the former position; McQueen and Cutler (1998) advocate the latter. Although the nature
of the lexical entry has not been completely determined, it is clear that in English recognizing a
spoken or written word makes available morphological information such as part of speech and
number marking that can be used in later stages of comprehension.
Serial versus parallel processing. An interesting and important issue with respect to
how words are recognized in reading deals with whether they are processed as wholes (in
parallel) or letter-by-letter (serially). More than 100 years ago, Cattell (1886) addressed this
question by briefly exposing words and letters and asking people to report what they saw. In
fact, subjects were better able to report the words than the letters. However, there were several
well-known flaws in the experiment having to do with guessing and memory artifacts.
Insert Figure 2 about
Cattell’s experiment lay dormant until Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970) replicated the
21
experiment but with important controls to eliminate the possible artifacts. The characteristics of
their paradigm are shown in Figure 1. Basically, a word, single letter, or non-word letter string
was presented very briefly (about 25-40 ms) and followed immediately by a masking pattern
which would interfere with any extended processing of the stimulus after its offset. Next, two
letter choices were presented: the correct letter and a letter that was not presented. Notice,
however, that the alternative letter in the word condition was always such that it made a word.
Thus, although the letter d was actually presented, the alternative response letter k also made a
word. The basic finding in these experiments (and many subsequent experiments) was that a
letter is better identified when it is embedded in a word than when it is presented in isolation or
in a non-word. This result, the word superiority effect, suggests that Cattell’s phenomenon is
real: letters in words are identified more accurately than letters in isolation. The phenomenon
forces two conclusions. First, the serial letter-by-letter view of word recognition can’t be correct:
it should take much longer to process four letters than one and given that the mask disrupts
processing, if this view were correct subjects should be more accurate with single letters than
words. Second, all of the letters in the word are processed since accuracy at identifying the
correct letter was independent of the letter position tested.
In general, the word superiority effect has been taken as evidence that all of the letters in
a word are processed in parallel. The effect ultimately led to the development of powerful
computer simulation models designed to account for the results. These models, called the
Interactive Activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982)
and the Verification model (Paap, Newsome, McDonald, & Schvaneveldt, 1982) were the
forerunners of even more elegant and powerful connectionist models (e.g., Seidenberg &
22
McClelland, 1989) mentioned earlier.
Sound Coding in Word Identification. So far, we have discussed visual word
identification as if it was a purely visual process. However, given that alphabets are designed to
code for the sounds of the words, it seems plausible that the process of identifying words is not
purely visual and also involves accessing the sounds that the letters represent and possibly
assembling them into the sound of a word. Moreover, if we think about accessing the sound of a
word, it becomes less clear what "word identification" means. Is it accessing a sequence of
abstract letters, accessing the sound of the word, accessing the meaning of the word, or some
combination of all three? In addition, what is the casual relationship between accessing the three
types of codes? One possibility is that readers merely access the visual code -- more-or-less like
getting to a dictionary entry -- and then "look up" the sound of the word and the meaning in the
lexicon. Another relatively simple possibility is that, for alphabetic languages, readers first
access the sound of the word and only then, access the meaning. That is, in this view, the written
symbols merely serve to access the spoken form of the language and meaning is tied only to the
spoken form. On the other hand, the relationship may be more complex. For example, the
written form may start to activate both the sound codes and the meaning codes, and then the three
types of codes send feedback to each other to arrive at a "solution" as to what the visual form,
auditory form, and meaning of the word are. There are probably few topics in reading that have
generated as much controversy as this: what the role of sound coding is in the reading process.
Given that naming words is quite rapid (around 500 ms) and given that a significant part
of this time must be taken up in both programming the motor response and executing the motor
act of speaking, it seems plausible that accessing the sound code could be rapid enough to be part
23
of the process of getting to the meaning of a word. But even if accessing the sound code is
accessed at least as rapidly as the meaning, it may not play any causal role. Certainly, there is no
logical necessity for involving the sound codes, as the sequence of letters is sufficient to access
the meaning (or meanings) of the word and in the Interactive Activation model (McClelland &
Rumelhart, 1981) and the Verification (Paap et al., 1982) models, access to the lexicon (and
hence word meaning) is achieved via a direct look-up procedure which only involves the letters
which constitute a word. However, before examining the role of sound coding in accessing the
meanings of words, let's first look at how sound codes, themselves, are accessed.
The Access of Sound Codes. There are three general possibilities for how we access the
pronunciation of a letter string. Many words in English have irregular pronunciations (e.g., one),
such that their pronunciations cannot be derived from the spelling-to-sound rules as defined by
the language. In these cases, it would seem that the only way to access the sound code would be
via a direct access procedure, where the word’s spelling is matched to a lexical entry within the
lexicon. In the above example, the letters o-n-e would activate the visual word detector for one
which would in turn activate the subsequent lexical entry. Once this entry is accessed, the
appropriate pronunciation for the word (/wun/) could be activated. In contrast, other words have
regular pronunciations (e.g., won). Such words’ pronunciations could also be accessed via a
direct route, but their sound codes could also be constructed through the utilization of spellingto-sound correspondence rules or by analogy to other words in the language (Glushko, 1981).
Finally, it is, of course, possible to pronounce nonwords like mard. Unless all possible
pronounceable letter strings have lexical entries (which seems unlikely), nonwords’ sound codes
would have to be constructed.
24
Research on acquired dyslexics, who were previously able to read normally but suffered
brain damage making reading even single words difficult, has revealed two constellations of
symptoms that seem to argue for the existence of both a direct and a constructive route to a
word's pronunciation (Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980). In surface dyslexia, the patients
can pronounce both real words and nonwords but they tend to “regularize” irregularly
pronounced words (e.g., pronouncing island as /iz-land/). In contrast to surface dyslexics, deep
and phonemic dyslexics can pronounce real words (whether they are regular or irregular), but
they cannot pronounce nonwords. It was initially believed that surface dyslexics completely
relied on their intact constructive route, whereas deep dyslexics completely relied on their direct
route. However, it is now realized that these syndromes are somewhat more complex than they
were first thought to be, and the descriptions of the syndromes are somewhat oversimplified.
Nonetheless, they do seem to argue that the two processes (a direct look-up process and a
constructive process) may be somewhat independent of each other.
Assuming that these two processes exist in skilled readers (who can pronounce both
irregular words and nonwords correctly) how do they relate to each other? The simplest
possibility is that they operate independently of each other in a "race". Whichever process
finishes first would presumably "win" and determine the pronunciation. Thus, since the direct
look-up process can't access the pronunciation of nonwords, the constructive process would
determine the pronunciation for nonwords. What would happen for words? Presumably, the
speed of the direct look-up process would be sensitive to how frequent the word was in the
language, with low frequency words taking longer to access than high frequency words.
However, the constructive process, which is not dependent on lexical knowledge, should be
25
largely independent of the word's frequency. Thus, for common (i.e. frequent) words, the
pronunciation of both regular and irregular words should be determined by the direct look-up
process and should take more-or-less the same time. For less frequent words, however, both the
direct and constructive process would be operating because the direct access process would be
slower. Thus, for irregular words, there would be conflict between the pronunciations generated
by the two processes. Irregular words should be pronounced more slowly (if the conflict is
resolved successfully) or with errors if the word is "regularized".
The data from a number of studies are consistent with such a "race" model. A very
reliable finding (see Baron & Strawson, 1976; Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975) is that regular words
are pronounced (named) more quickly than irregular words. However, the difference in naming
times between regular and irregular words is a function of word frequency: for high frequency
words there is little or no difference, but there are large differences for low frequency words.
However, the process of naming is likely to be more complex than a simple race, as people
usually make few errors in naming, even for low frequency irregular words. Thus, somehow, the
two routes "cooperate" in some way to produce the correct pronunciation, but when the two
routes conflict in their output, there is slowing of the naming time.
There are two final points worth noting. First, few words are totally "irregular". That is,
even for quite irregular words like one and island, the constructive route would produce a
pronunciation that had some overlap with the actual pronunciation. Second, the fact that low
frequency words take more processing time is not restricted to naming or lexical decision tasks.
Sereno and Rayner (2000b) found that evidence for this frequency by regularity interaction in
that readers' eye fixations were longer on irregular low frequency words than on irregular high
26
frequency words.
Sound Codes and the Access of Word Meaning. In the previous section we discussed
how readers access a word's sound codes. However, a much more important question is how a
word's meaning is accessed. As indicated earlier, this has been a highly contentious issue with
respected researchers stating quite differing positions (with some claiming that readers do not
form articulatory representations of printed words and others claiming that the heart of reading is
the decoding of written symbols into speech). Although a great deal has been learned about this
topic, the controversy represented by this dichotomy of views continues, and researchers’
opinions on this question still differ greatly.
Some of the first attempts to resolve this issue utilized the lexical decision task. One
question was whether there was a difference between regularly spelled words and irregularly
spelled words in such a task, under the tacit assumption that this task was reflecting the speed of
accessing the meaning of words (Bauer & Stanovich, 1980; Coltheart, 1978). Unfortunately
these data tended to be highly variable in that some studies found a regularity effect while others
did not. Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974) utilized a somewhat different paradigm, and
found that the time for subjects to determine whether touch was a word was slower when it was
preceded by a word such as couch (which presumably primed the incorrect pronunciation) as
compared to when it was preceded by an unrelated word. However, there is now considerable
concern that the lexical decision is fundamentally flawed as a measure of lexical access that is
related to accessing a word's meaning. The most influential of these arguments was that it
induces artificial checking strategies before making a response (Balota & Chumbley, 1984, 1985;
Chumbley & Balota, 1984).
27
A task that presumably does get at the issue of how a word’s meaning is accessed is the
categorization task. As noted earlier, in this task, people are given a category label (e.g., tree)
and then are given a target word (e.g., beech, beach, or bench) and have to decide whether it
represents a member of the preceding category (Van Orden, 1987; Van Orden, Johnston, & Hale,
1988; Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990). The key finding was that subjects had a hard
time rejecting homophones of true category exemplars (e.g., beach). Not only were they slow in
rejecting these items, they typically made 10-20% more errors on these items than control items
that were visually similar (e.g., bench). In fact, these errors persisted even under conditions
when people were urged to be cautious and go slowly. Moreover, the effect is not restricted to
word homophones. A similar, though somewhat smaller, effect was reported with
pseudohomophones (like brane). Moreover, in a similar semantic relatedness judgment task (i.e.,
decide whether the two words on the screen are semantically related), subjects are slower and
make more errors on false homophone pairs such as pillow-bead. (Bead is a "false homophone"
of pillow because bead could be a homophone of bed analogously to head rhyming with bed.)
These findings (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1998) with pseudohomophones and false homophones both
make it unlikely that these results are merely due to people just not knowing the spelling of the
target words and argue that phonology plays a significant role in accessing a word's meaning.
Sound codes in reading. The work that we described above has dealt largely with the
extent to which sound codes are involved in identifying words in isolation. However, there has
also been considerable research on the use of sound codes in reading sentences and extended
discourse. Some research (Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980) suggested that sound codes are useful in
that they aid comprehension processes since information about prosodic structure may be
28
available from them. The more critical question, however, is whether or not sound codes are
activated early or late in processing during reading. To address this issue, Pollatsek, Lesch,
Morris, and Rayner (1992) utilized the boundary paradigm discussed earlier to examine whether
phonological codes are active before words are even fixated (and hence very early in processing).
In their study, the preview word was either identical to the target word (beach or shoot), a
homophone of it (beech or chute), or an orthographic control word (bench or shout). Thus,
readers were presented with a different word in the target word location before they fixated it and
during the saccade to that region a display change occurred (so that beech changed to beach or
chute changed to shoot), although they were not aware of the change. The key finding was that
fixation time on the target word was shorter when the preview was a homophone than when it
was just orthographically similar. This indicates that, in reading text, sound codes are extracted
from words even before they are fixated, which is quite early in the encoding process. Research
by Rayner, Sereno, Lesch, and Pollatsek (1995; see also Lee, Binder, Kim, Pollatsek, & Rayner,
1998; Lee, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1999) using the fast priming technique has also obtained
evidence that sound codes are activated very early during reading. Other standard eye movement
experiments have also found effects consistent with this claim (Folk & Morris, 1995; Folk,
1999).
Some other paradigms, however, have come up with less positive evidence for the
importance of sound coding in word identification during reading. Daneman and Reingold
(1993; Daneman, Reingold, & Davidson, 1995) used a manipulation in a reading study similar to
the preview study with three conditions: correct homophone, incorrect homophone, and spelling
control (e.g., Alone at his teller’s cage, idle and -- with the sentence continuing with either
29
bored, board, or beard). However, in their studies, a "wrong" word (either the wrong homophone
or the spelling control) remained in the text throughout the trial. People read short passage
containing these "errors" and the key question was whether the wrong homophones would be less
disruptive than the spelling controls because they "sounded right". In two studies, Daneman and
colleagues found there was disruption in the reading process (measured by examining the time
spent looking at the target word before moving to another word) for both types of wrong words,
though no significant difference between the wrong homophones and the spelling control, though
they did find more disruption for the spelling control when later measures of processing (which
included regressive fixations on the target word were examined). This finding is consistent with
a view where sound coding plays only a back-up role in word identification. However, in a
similar type of study, Rayner, Pollatsek, and Binder (1998) found greater disruption for the
spelling control than for the wrong homophone on "immediate" measures of processing. Even in
the Rayner et al. study, the homophone effects are relatively small (far more so than in the Van
Orden paradigm mentioned above). It appears that sentence and paragraph context may interact
with word processing to make errors (be they phonological or orthographical) less damaging to
the reading process (see Jared, Levy, & Rayner, 1999 on the issue of interactions with reading
skill).
Recognizing Words in Sentences
Frequency effects. In both reading and listening, it is clearly the case that the frequency
of the word matters. Numerous experiments have demonstrated that high frequency words are
processed faster and more efficiently than low frequency words. Before discussing some typical
results, let’s back up a bit and ask the question “How is frequency determined”? Most typically,
30
it is done by relying on corpus data in which the occurrence of each word in the corpus is
tabulated and summed. The most frequently used corpus data are the Francis and Ku era (1982)
and CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993) counts. These data bases typically provide
information not only about how frequently each word form is used but also provide information
about usage (e.g., is the word used as a noun or verb). The frequency of a word is usually
measured by taking some corpus of text that is assumed to be representative and actually
counting the number of times that a particularly word occurs. To give some feel for frequency
counts, words such as irk, jade, cove, vane, and prod have counts of 2 to 5 per million (in the
Francis and Ku era count), while words like cat, coat, greet, and square all have frequencies
greater than 30 per million. The most frequent words are typically short function words like the,
and, of, and for. Thus, there is a confounding in natural language such that the most frequent
words are typically shorter than other words and they also tend to be function words (as opposed
to content words). However, in typical experiments dealing with word frequency effects, these
very high frequent function words would not be used. Rather, words would be matched on
extraneous variables (such as word length, number of syllables, part of speech, etc) so that the
only difference between the high and low frequency words is indeed their frequency of
occurrence.
The difference in lexical decision time between a high frequency word like coat and a low
frequency word like cove is about 100-150 ms, while the difference in naming times is more like
30-60 ms (Balota & Chumbley, 1984, 1985; Chumbley & Balota, 1984). Clearly, both of these
differences can’t be estimates of how much longer it takes to identify a low frequency word than
a high frequency word. When people are asked to read sentences containing high or low
31
frequency target words (with the same neutral context preceding the target word, so that every
word in the sentence is the same except for the target word), the difference in fixation time
between them is closer to 30-60 ms (Inhoff & Rayner, 1986; Rayner & Duffy, 1986; Rayner,
Sereno, & Raney, 1996). Thus, 30-60 ms seems like a better guess as to the effect of frequency
in reading; the longer time associated with the lexical decision task has generally been assumed
to be because there is a time consuming decision stage in that task. One interesting additional
observation from the eye movement studies is that not only is the fixation time longer on the
target word, it is also longer on the next word. Thus, the processing of the low frequency word
apparently “spills over” onto the processing of the next word in the sentence. Schilling, Rayner,
and Chumbley (1998) recently specifically compared readers’ performance in the three tasks and
found that naming and fixation times yielded similar frequency effects for the target words
whereas the effect on lexical decision time was much larger. They also found that there was a
correlation between the frequency effect and average response time in the three tasks. In general,
Schilling et al.’s data suggest that both naming and lexical decision tasks yield data about word
recognition processes that are consistent with effects found in eye fixations in silent reading.
Frequency effects have also been observed in categorization tasks (Lewellen, Goldinger,
Pisoni, & Greene, 1993; Monsell, Doyle, & Haggard, 1989) in which people have to decide
whether or not a word belongs to a certain category and in the early components of the ERP
response (Sereno, Rayner, & Posner, 1999). In listening experiments, frequency effects have also
been observed (Ferreira et al., 1996; Foss & Blank, 1980). In reading, a particularly interesting
effect reported by Henderson and Ferreira (1990) is that when readers fixate on a low frequency
word, they are able to obtain less information from the word to the right of fixation in parafoveal
32
vision than when they are fixated on a high frequency word (see also Kennison & Clifton, 1995).
Although frequency effects are rather ubiquitous in language processing research, there is
some controversy about whether effects that have been attributed to word frequency are actually
due to an age of acquisition factor that is correlated with frequency (Ellis & Lambon Ralph,
2000; Morrison & Ellis, 1995). According to this view, what is really critical is the age at which
a word was learned rather than frequency of occurrence per se. On the other hand, a recent study
(Lewis, Gerhand, & Ellis, 2001) demonstrated that cumulative frequency effects can account for
age-of-acquisition effects. While we agree that this issue is important, we suspect that more data
need to be obtained before final determinations can be made concerning the relative weight to
give to each factor. Likewise, it is also sometimes argued (Gernsbacher, 1984; Lewellen et al.,
1993) that familiarity ratings in which people rate how familiar a given word is might be more
important than corpus frequency measures. Again, we do not disagree that familiarity per se is
an important factor. However, what strikes us as most important in the present context is that
words that are more frequent, more familiar, and acquired earlier are easier to process when
reading or listening.
What exactly do frequency effects reflect? There is some controversy as to whether
frequency effects reflect lexical access or integration processes. According to an integration
account, high frequency words would be easier to integrate into the discourse representation that
a reader is building than a low frequency word. In general, we suspect that most researchers
believe that frequency effects are due to lexical access processes. One prominent model of eye
movements during reading, the E-Z Reader model (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998),
certainly associates frequency effects with access processes. The fact that there are spillover
33
effects (Rayner & Duffy, 1986) from reading a low frequency word suggests that frequency does
affect integration processes, but the frequency effect is primarily due to access processes.
Contextual constraint effects. Another variable known to influence the processing of a
word is the degree of contextual constraint (or predictability) for a given word. The first
experiments (Tulving & Gold, 1963; Tulving, Mandler, & Baumal, 1964; Morton, 1964)
attempting to demonstrate context effects in a reading-like situation involved having subjects
read a sentence fragment like The skiers were buried alive by the sudden.... The subjects were
then shown the target word avalanche very briefly. They were able to identify the target word at
significantly briefer exposures when the context predicted it than when it was preceded by
neutral, inappropriate, or no context. These results were assumed to demonstrate that context
affects the identification of words during reading. However, many researchers have questioned
whether such situations have any bearing on normal reading. The brief presentation virtually
guarantees that the visual information from the target word is not fully registered and hence
degraded. The identification of a word in this situation is thus likely to be the result of a slow
conscious problem solving process rather than normal perceptual identification.
Accordingly, the procedure was subsequently modified so that the target word appeared
after the sentence frame was presented until the participant made a response to it (Stanovich &
West, 1983). Most of these experiments required the participant to either name the target word
(Stanovich & West, 1979; Becker, 1985) or make a lexical decision regarding the target word
(Schuberth & Eimas, 1977; Fischler & Bloom, 1979). While this type of procedure alters the
natural reading process, the timing relations aren’t too different from normal reading if the delay
between the sentence context and the target word is relatively brief. In most of these
34
experiments, it has been shown that a highly constraining context facilitates naming or lexical
decision latency relative to a neutral condition such as the frame The next word in the sentence
will be. We should note that there has been some controversy over the appropriate baseline to
use in these experiments, but that is beyond the scope of this chapter.
While experiments in which a sentence fragment is presented followed by a target word
approximate fluent reading, there are some key differences. The first, of course, is that an
extraneous response (naming or lexical decision) is called for, and the second is that a delay is
introduced between the sentence fragment and the target word. Since the best way to study fluent
reading is through the use of eye movements, we will focus on how they have been employed to
study context effects. There are now numerous experiments that demonstrate that contextual
constraint has strong influences on eye movements in reading (Balota, Pollatsek, & Rayner,
1985; Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981; Morris, 1994). First, words that are highly constrained by the
context are skipped more frequently than words that are not highly constrained (the difference is
usually about 10-15%). This has often been argued to mean that the predictable words are
identified on the prior fixation. Second, when the target words are not skipped, highly
constrained words are fixated for less time than unconstrained words. Third, when the word to
the right of fixation is highly constrained by the preceding context, readers get more preview
benefit from it than when it is not so constrained (Balota et al., 1985). In general, the pattern of
results obtained in these experiments suggests that context can speed lexical access. The fact that
more preview benefit is obtained when the next word is highly constrained is consistent with this
idea as is the fact that highly constrained words are skipped more than unconstrained words.
The eye movement studies establish that context does affect the amount of time spent on
35
a word, although the effects are relatively modest (fixation time is generally about 20-25 ms
shorter on constrained words than unconstrained words). They also make a “guessing game”
model of reading quite unlikely. In guessing game models (Goodman, 1970; Hochberg, 1970;
Levin & Kaplan, 1970), conscious prediction is seen as a major factor in identifying words in text
so that visual information does not have to be fully processed. These types of models have not
been very popular for some time since there seem to be too many costs associated with conscious
prediction. First, such prediction is likely to be wrong more than it is right since readers are not
very good at predicting the next word, even with unlimited amounts of time (Gough, Alford, &
Holley-Wilcox, 1981). Second, one would expect that such prediction would take processing
resources away from the higher-order processes needed to put the words together to form
syntactic and semantic structures. Third, if guessing what the next word is in reading were an
important part of word identification, one would expect much bigger effects than those obtained
in the eye movement experiments where the deck has been stacked to make guessing prevail. In
short, the data suggest that while context does affect processing time for a word, it is at a stage of
speeding processing rather than due to some type of guessing.
Contextual constraint effects have also been demonstrated in listening experiments. Prior
to discussing these effects, we must note that some theories of speech perception (e.g.,
McClelland & Elman, 1986) are generally highly interactive and permit higher level processes to
influence what you actually hear. According to them, the speech sounds that you perceive may
actually be different from the speech sounds that actually reach our ears because cognitive and
contextual factors influence our perception of the actual speech signal. Evidence for this comes
from the phonemic-restoration effect (Samuel, 1981; Warren, 1970; Warren & Warren, 1970).
36
Warren (1970) presented listeners with a recording of the sentence The state governors met with
their respective legi*latures convening in the capital city, but a 120 ms portion of the sentence
was replaced with a coughing sound (indicated by the asterisk in the example). Only 1 of 20
listeners reported detecting a missing sound replaced by a cough and that person misreported its
location. The other 19 heard the word legislature as they restored the missing phoneme that is
predicted by the contextual information. In a subsequent study, Warren and Warren (1970)
demonstrated that listeners are capable of using a great deal of information to determine the
correct sound. They presented listeners with the sentence It was found that the *eel was on the
fragment, and then they heard either axle, show, orange, or table. All listeners heard the same
sentence except for the last word and the asterisk again indicates a missing segment in the
sentence. Depending on the word which they actually heard at the end of the sentence, listeners
reported hearing wheel, heel, peel, or meal. Again, the context influenced the listener’s report of
a sound, although in this case the relevant context occurred so far after the missing phoneme that
the restoration effect presumably reflected a report bias (cf. Saumel, 1981).
Another example that listeners use context to help perceive speech comes from studies
reported by Marslen-Wilson (1973, 1975; Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978) which used a “fast
shadowing” paradigm in which people had to rapidly shadow (repeat) speech. Some distortions
were made in the actual speech, so that listeners actually heard the pseudoword cigaresh. They
were more likely to restore the distortion to the proper pronunciation (cigarette) if the word was
highly predictable from the preceding context (for example, He still wanted to smoke a cigaresh).
It may be that, under some common circumstances, contextual information plays a larger
role in listening than in reading. The speech signal may commonly be degraded, masked by other
37
sounds, casually or quickly spoken; in such cases, we may rely more heavily on higher order
processes to make sense of the signal. In reading, on the other hand, a visually degraded stimulus
is unusual, and we do have the luxury to go back and look at information that has already been
processed if the word was not adequately recognized or encoded initially. We doubt, though, that
there is a principled difference between reading and listening in the extent to which a discourse
context affects the encoding of individual words.
Ambiguity effects. Words can be ambiguous on a number of dimensions. They can be
phonologically ambiguous in that two words can be pronounced the same way (but spelled
differently, as in break-brake) and mean different things. There are also sense ambiguities (as in
newspaper, which can mean what you read every morning or an organization). And, words can
be lexically ambiguous in that two meanings are spelled and pronounced the same (as in bank
and straw). The issue of how lexically ambiguous words are processed has been center-stage in
debates concerning the extent to which various components of language are modular or
interactive. That is, does language processing consist of a number of different modules, each
selectively sensitive to a limited range of information? Or, is language processing a highly
interactive process in which low level modules (involved in word recognition) are influenced by
higher order processing (like effects due to contextual effects)?
The earliest experiments on lexical ambiguity were done with people listening to
sentences with ambiguous words (Foss & Jenkins, 1973; Swinney & Hakes, 1976). Processing
difficulty was measured using the phoneme monitoring task. The results of these early studies
were consistent with exhaustive access (both meanings of the ambiguous word are activated
when it is encountered, so phoneme monitoring time was slower following the ambiguous word)
38
(but cf. Mehler, Sequi, & Carey, 1978; Newman & Dell, 1978, for some criticisms of the task).
More direct evidence came from experiments (Swinney, 1979; Tanenhaus, Leiman, &
Seidenberg, 1979) that used a cross-modal priming task to support exhaustive or at least multiple
access. In the cross-modal priming task, a subject hears a target sentence such as The man found
several insects, spiders, and other bugs in the room. The word bugs is ambiguous in that it can
mean either an insect or a listening device. In the task, at some point relative to when subjects
hear bugs (either before they hear it, simultaneously with hearing it, or after hearing it) a word
appears on a video monitor and they must respond to it (via a lexical decision). The lexical
decision times for three different kinds of words are then examined: ant (related to the insect
meaning), spy (related to the other meaning), or sew (a word unrelated to either meaning (the
length and frequency of the target words was controlled). The key question is whether the lexical
decision time to spy is any faster than to the unrelated word sew. In fact, when the target word
appeared on the monitor at the offset of the ambiguous word, the response times for spy and ant
were about the same, and faster than the time for sew. This result clearly suggests that both
meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed, even when the context strongly disambiguates the
meaning of the word. It was also found that if the target word was delayed for about 200 ms, the
priming effect on spy disappeared, indicating that context quickly inhibited the “wrong” meaning
of bugs.
Other experiments replicated the basic result (Burgess, Seidenberg, & Tanenhaus, 1988;
Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienknowski, 1982) and extended
it by demonstrating that both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed (using priming as the
indicator of access), even when one of the meanings is highly dominant such as boxer. However,
39
in these cases, the less dominant meaning (type of dog) was no longer active after about 200 ms,
even when the prior context did not disambiguate the word. Thus, it appears that rapid inhibition
of one of the meanings is produced not only by prior context but also by a more dominant
meaning of a lexical item inhibiting a weaker one. Further, there is some reason to think that a
context that is sufficiently strongly biased can promote selective as opposed to multiple access
(Tabossi, 1988) and that measures more sensitive than naming time (specifically, ERPs that
reflect semantic anomaly) can provide evidence of selective access (Van Petten & Kutas, 1987;
see also Simpson, 1984, 1994, for additional discussion of the controversy over the details of
how lexically ambiguous words are processed in listening).
What about during reading? Although there are again issues related to certain details of
the findings (see Rayner, Binder, & Duffy, 1999; Vu & Kellas, 1999), there seems to be clear
evidence that both contextual information and meaning dominance play critical roles. There are
now a large number of eye movement studies (see Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988; Rayner &
Duffy, 1986; Rayner & Frazier, 1989; Rayner, Pacht, & Duffy, 1994; Sereno, Pacht, & Rayner,
1992 for examples) that have examined how lexically ambiguous words are processed during
reading. The basic findings from this research suggest that both meaning dominance and
contextual information influence the processing of such words. For ambiguous words (like
straw) where there are two equally likely meanings, readers look longer at such words in neutral
contexts than at a control word matched in length and word frequency. However, when the prior
context disambiguates the meaning that should be instantiated, fixation times are no longer than
on the control word. Thus, the contextual information helps the reader choose the appropriate
meaning. For ambiguous words (like bank) where one meaning is much more dominant than the
40
other, in neutral contexts readers look no longer at the ambiguous word than the control word.
On the other hand, if the following parts of the sentence make it clear that the subordinate
meaning should be instantiated, fixation times on the disambiguating information are quite long
and regressions back to the target word are frequent (suggesting that the reader incorrectly
selected the dominant meaning and now has to recompute the subordinate meaning).
Conversely, when the disambiguating information precedes the biased ambiguous word and the
subordinate meaning is instantiated, readers’ gaze durations on the ambiguous word are
lengthened. Apparently, the contextual information increased the level of activation for the
subordinate meaning so that the two meanings are in competition (just as the two meanings of a
balanced ambiguous word like straw are in competition in a neutral context). This general
pattern of results has been interpreted in the context of a model called the Reordered Access
model (Duffy et al., 1988) and the data have been simulated using a constraint-satisfaction
framework (Duffy, Kambe, & Rayner, 2001).
Comprehending sentences
The nature of the task.
Identifying the words in a written or spoken sentence is only the initial step toward
arriving at an understanding of its meaning and function. It is a necessary step; it makes the
word's sense and its other linguistic properties available. But understanding a sentence is far
more than simply combining the meanings of its words. A reader or listener must determine how
words are related to one another in phrases, how these phrases are related to one another, how
these phrases and their relations are to be interpreted semantically, and how the semantic object
that corresponds to the sentence is related to the ongoing discourse.
41
The property of language that makes all this possible is its compositionality. A reader or
listener can compose the meaning of a complex object, like a sentence, out of the meanings of its
parts. In doing so, the reader/listener is guided by knowledge of the grammar of the language, the
principles that govern how words can be combined into sentences. From this perspective, the
core question in the psychology of language comprehension is, how does the reader/listener use
his or her knowledge of the grammar of his/her language to recover the intended meaning of
sentences?
Two aspects of language make the task of "parsing" a challenging one. The first is that sentences
are frequently ambiguous, at least momentarily (cf. Church & Patil, 1982, for a corpus-based
analysis). This fact is illustrated by the sentences in Table 1 (from Frazier & Clifton, 1996). All
the sentence forms illustrated in this table have been used in research designed to see how
readers resolve temporary ambiguity. The second aspect of language that makes parsing difficult
is that the words and phrases that are related to one another are not necessarily adjacent in a
sentence. The existence of "long distance dependencies" in language follows from the fact that
natural language permits one phrase or sentence to be included inside another, recursively. A
relative clause structure (The boy whom I used to know left) provides a simple example, in
which the verb left is dependent on the noun phrase (NP) the boy. Another structure that results
in a long-distance dependency in English is the wh-question, illustrated in Who did you used to
know, where the question NP who is dependent on the direct object position following know.
Were it not for temporary ambiguities and long-distance dependencies, the phrase structure of a
sentence could in principle be recovered by a very simple parsing mechanism. It is only because
of these properties of natural language that the task is an interesting and challenging one.
42
Insert Table 1 about here
In this section, we will review empirical evidence that puts constraints on explanations of
how people succeed in the task of comprehending written and spoken sentences (see Clifton &
Duffy, 2001). We will place this evidence in the context of various theoretical interpretations of
parsing, but refer readers elsewhere for extensive discussions of parsing theory (e.g., Frazier,
1990, 1995a; Frazier & Clifton, 1996; Gibson, 1998; Jurafsky, 1996; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, &
Seidenberg, 1994; Mitchell, 1994; Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995; Vosse & Kempen, 2000).
Priority of grammar. It is clear that readers and listeners use their knowledge of
language structure (morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology) to constrain their
interpretations of sentences. Early in the history of psycholinguistics, there was some debate
about whether grammatical knowledge plays a role in normal sentence comprehension (cf. Fodor,
Bever, & Garrett, 1974; Riesbeck & Schank, 1978). However, since then, a wide range of
phenomena have pointed to the use of detailed grammatical knowledge in interpreting sentences.
Frazier (1983) presented some elementary pre-experimental arguments that readers and listeners
must use their knowledge of grammar. For instance, Frazier discussed how English speakers
form dramatically different interpretations of the sentences The umpire helped the child to third
base and The umpire helped the child on third base, and can form two very different
interpretations of He showed her baby pictures (He showed her baby the pictures vs. He showed
her the baby pictures). These interpretations are triggered by what might appear to be very minor
changes in the lexical makeup of the sentences except that the changes have major implications
for grammatical structure. Scarcely any experiments on sentence comprehension in the past two
decades have suggested otherwise. To take just one example, the fact that the very first fixation
43
on was discovered is disrupted while reading After you drank the strange looking water was
discovered to be polluted (Frazier & Rayner, 1982) implies that readers take detailed information
about grammatical possibilities into account. Presumably, readers first give the strange looking
water the grammatical analysis of direct object of drank, but realize that this analysis was in error
as soon as they read was.
Grammatical knowledge thus takes priority in the sense that it must be honored in
sentence comprehension, even if doing so results in an implausible or incoherent message. After
all, as Garrett (1976) noted, the purpose of grammar is to allow us to say surprising things. But it
is an open question whether grammatical knowledge takes priority in a temporal or logical sense
over other sources of information that might guide sentence interpretation. Some theorists (e.g.
Frazier, 1978, 1990) suggest that it does; other theorists (e.g. MacDonald et al, 1994) suggest
otherwise (and still others, most notably Bever, Sanz & Townsend, 1998, argue that syntax is
used only after the use of semantics).
Immediacy. The past three decades of study of sentence and text comprehension strongly
suggest that readers and listeners generally arrive at a semantic interpretation of a sentence in an
apparently-incremental and nearly-immediate fashion. They do not wait for the end of a clause or
sentence (as Fodor et al., 1974, suggested), but instead their understanding of a sentence seems to
keep up with words as they are heard or as the eyes land on them. Marslen-Wilson’s (MarslenWilson, 1973; Marslen-Wilson, 1975) rapid auditory shadowing studies demonstrated this, as do
Pickering and Traxler’s (Pickering & Traxler, 1998; Pickering, Traxler, & Crocker, 2000;
Traxler & Pickering, 1996a) more recent eye movement studies. As noted earlier, MarslenWilson found that some mispronunciations (cigaresh) were spontaneously corrected more often
44
when they made sense in a context than when there was no supporting context, and Pickering and
Traxler showed that the implausibility of a word (magazine, in As the woman sailed the
magazine....) led to a nearly-immediate disruption of eye movements (cf. also Clifton, 1993;
Speer & Clifton, 1998).
It may be that not all semantic interpretation is incremental and immediate. Frazier and
Rayner (1987) found that syntactic category ambiguities (is train a verb or a noun in The desert
trains....?) are not resolved immediately, and Frazier and Rayner (1990) found the same thing
about the sense of a word (newspaper – the paper object or the institution). However, as a first
approximation, readers and listeners do seem to build interpretations on an on-line word-by-word
basis.
Depth-first theories of parsing: Structural simplicity and beyond.
The earliest work in the modern psycholinguistics of sentence comprehension
demonstrated effects of structural similarity on sentence memory (Clifton & Odom, 1966;
Mehler, 1963) and effects of structural complexity on sentence comprehension and verification
(Gough, 1965; Stolz, 1967). For example, multiply self-embedded sentences, such as The first
shot the tired soldier the mosquito bit fired missed, are demonstrably hard to comprehend and
remember. However, this early work did not support the development of plausible theories of
how structural factors played a role in the sentence comprehension process.
Interesting theories of how the sentence comprehension mechanism uses a
reader/listener's knowledge of grammar in comprehending sentences were developed by linguists
and computer scientists in the 1970's (Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Frazier, 1978; Kimball,
1973; Marcus, 1980). These theories attempted to identify the factors that a reader or listener
45
would use to create an initial structural analysis of a sentence that could then be semantically
interpreted and integrated into a discourse (but cf. Forster, 1979, for an early "parallel" model
that assumed all structural analyses were initially created)
These theories, particularly Frazier's "garden path" theory, led to a great deal of empirical
research and eventually to the creation of interesting alternative theories. Frazier's basic claim is
that the reader/listener uses his/her knowledge of the syntactic structure of language, encoded as
phrase structure rules or templates, to attach each incoming word into a phrase structure tree that
represents the phrasal segments of a sentence and the relations between them. All phrase
structure templates that contain the incoming word's syntactic category as a terminal element are
examined in parallel. The first template (if there is one) whose root matches an accessible node
in the existing phrase structure tree is used to attach the incoming word into the tree. If no such
matching root exists, other phrase structure templates whose terminal elements match this root
node are examined in the search for a template that will support attachment. The search is
iterated until it is successful (or abandoned, in the case of an ungrammatical string).
For example, consider a tree (Figure 5, panel 1) that has developed to contain a S
(sentence) node above a lexically complete NP (noun phrase node, e.g., John). An incoming verb
such as saw is then identified as a V (verb) (Panel 2). No template containing V as a terminal
element has a root that matches the S-above-NP tree, but the template with VP (verb phrase) as a
root permits finding a template with VP as a terminal element and S as its root (Panel 3). These
two templates permit attaching V to VP to S (Panel 4). The simple assumption that the
processing system selects the first way of attaching the incoming word into the tree that it can
find predicts that words will be "minimally attached," i.e., attached into the phrase structure tree
46
with the smallest number of added nodes (see Frazier, 1987a, and Fodor & Inoue, 2000, for
further discussion). In the event that two possible attachment operations are equally minimal
(requiring the same number of phrase structure templates to connect the incoming word into the
existing tree), preference is given to the one that attaches the new word into the phrase currently
being processed, presumably because of its greater availability.
Insert Figure 5 about here
Frazier and Rayner (1982) introduced the study of eye movement monitoring into
sentence comprehension research, testing some implications of Frazier's (1978) serial, depth-first,
garden-path theory. They showed disruption of eye movements in the disambiguating
(boldfaced) region of sentences like Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a very short
distance to him and The second wife will claim the inheritance belongs to her. They assumed
that the reader had initially constructed the single analysis of the temporarily ambiguous region
that was predicted by Frazier's (1978) theory and then had to revise it when disambiguating
material indicated it was incorrect. The observed disruption in this case presumably reflected the
processing effort required to recognize that the initial analysis was incorrect and to revise it to be
consistent with the sentence as it continued.
Support for the predictions of Frazier's minimal attachment and recency ("late closure")
principles has been found in a wide range of sentence constructions. Table 1 presents a list of
constructions for which reading disruption has been experimentally demonstrated when a
temporary ambiguity in the sentence is resolved in favor of the interpretation which is predicted
to be unpreferred. However, other theorists have advanced a variety of factors other than
structural simplicity that they claimed readers and listeners use in initially parsing a sentence.
47
Ford, Bresnan, and Kaplan (1982) claimed that, rather than initially constructing the simplest
structure for the arguments of a verb, the parser initially selects the structure that is most
frequently used for that verb. Abney (1989), Crocker (1985), and Pritchett (1992) developed the
claim that the parser made its structural choices by favoring an analysis that treats a phrase as an
argument of a verb or other argument assigner, not as an adjunct. Phillips and Gibson (1997) and
Stevenson (1994) proposed that the parser prefers to attach a new phrase to the most recent
available phrase, not to the phrase which would result in the simplest attachment. Crain and
Steedman (1985) and Altmann and Steedman (1988) developed a referential theory of parsing,
which claimed that, after projecting all possible interpretations in parallel, a reader or listener
initially selects the interpretation which requires the least modifications to the existing discourse
structure to permit all its terms to refer successfully.
There is substantial evidence that factors such as frequency, argument structure, recency,
and context must be considered in developing a theory of sentence parsing. Frequency of usage
of particular structures does seem to have important effects, to be discussed in the following
section on lexical factors in comprehension. The argument/adjunct distinction has been the focus
of a smaller amount of research, which indicates that a reader or listener does seem to favor
analyzing a phrase as an argument rather than an adjunct (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991;
Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998; note that Clifton et al. provide some evidence
that this preference may reflect processes that operate after the creation of an initial structural
analysis.) Gibson and his colleagues (e.g., Phillips & Gibson, 1997; Gibson, Pearlmutter,
Canseco-Gonsales, & Hickok, 1996) have provided evidence for the importance of recency in
several distinct contexts. And a quite substantial amount of research, to be reviewed next,
48
indicates that discourse context affects parsing.
Context effects Some research suggests that discourse context affects parsing in the way
described by referential theory (Altmann & Steedman, 1988). This theory claimed that a reader's
syntactic knowledge makes available, in parallel, multiple possible interpretations of a sentence.
The parser then selects the interpretation whose semantic presuppositions are best satisfied by the
discourse context. Most research on the effects of discourse context on parsing has considered
phrases that are ambiguous between a modifier usage and some other usage. For instance,
consider the sentences The burglar blew open the safe with the dynamite/new lock and made off
with the loop (Altmann & Steedman, 1988). In the version containing the phrase with the
dynamite, this phrase is most plausibly interpreted a an instrumental modifier of the verb blow
open while in the version with with the new lock the phrase modifies the NP the safe. While
Frazier's (1987a) garden path theory predicts that the instrument version will be read faster (since
the VP attachment of the with-phrase is simpler than the NP attachment; cf. Rayner, Frazier, &
Carlson, 1983 for supporting evidence), Altmann & Steedman found that the relative speed of
reading the two versions depended on the context. The NP attachment version was read faster
than VP attachment in a context that introduced two safes (one with a new lock), thus satisfying
the claimed presuppositions of the NP modifier; the VP attachment version was read faster in a
context that introduced only a single safe.
Numerous researchers have examined effects like this one (e.g., Altmann, 1988; Altmann,
Garnham, & Dennis, 1992; Britt, 1994; Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Mitchell & Corley, 1994;
Murray & Liversedge, 1994; Rayner, Garrod, & Perfetti, 1992; see Mitchell, 1994, for a
summary; see Clifton & Ferreira, 1989, and Steedman & Altmann, 1989, for critical discussion
49
of the early research). It does seem clear that a discourse with two possible referents for an
unmodified definite NP will disrupt reading, because of the NP's failure to refer successfully.
Further, a context that supports a normally-unpreferred modifier interpretation (e.g., the "two
safes" context mentioned above) can eliminate the disruption observed for such an interpretation
out of context. However, this elimination of garden-pathing seems to be fully effective only when
the structural preference for the normally-preferred interpretation is a weak one (e.g. for a
prepositional phrase that is an optional argument or an adjunct of the verb, like the instrumental
modifier with the dynamite). Garden-pathing is not eliminated when the structural preference is
strong (e.g., a preference for a main clause analysis rather than a reduced relative clause analysis
as in Bever's (1970) The horse raced past the barn fell, or an adverb's preference to modify a
recent vs. a distant verb as in Altmann, van Nice, Garnham, & Henstra's, 1998, She'll implement
the plan she proposed next week, or a preference for an obligatory verb argument vs. a NP
modifier as in Britt's (1994) He put the book on the battle onto the chair). Rather, in these cases,
context that satisfies the presumed presuppositions of a modifier simply reduces the amount of
disruption caused by the garden path.
Other types of context may have more substantial effects. Altmann et al. (1998) presented
sentences like She'll implement the plan she proposed next week in a context where it answered a
question like When will Fiona implement the plan she proposed? This context eliminated or even
reversed the normal recency-based preference for the sentence-final adverb to modify the most
recent verb. Trueswell and Tanenhaus (1991, 1992) found that the garden-pathing normally
observed in a sentence like The student spotted by the proctor was expelled was largely
eliminated in a context that described a future event ...tomorrow...a proctor will notice one of the
50
students cheating.
A nonlinguistic context may have even more dramatic effects on sentence
comprehension. Tanenhaus and colleagues, (e.g., Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson,
1999; Spivey, Tanenhaus, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 2001; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, &
Sedivy, 1995) used a head-mounted eyetracker to measure where people looked in an array of
objects while they were following auditory instructions about pointing to or manipulating these
objects. In this situation, the eyes seem to move quickly to whatever is being referred to (Cooper,
1974). Upon hearing a command like Put the cup on the napkin under the book, the eyes seem to
do different things depending on whether the object array contains an empty napkin and two cups
(one on a napkin) vs just one cup. The eyes quickly moved to the empty napkin in the one-cup
context, suggesting that the on the napkin phrase was taken as a goal, but in the two-cup context,
they did not. The latter context may have overridden the default preference to take the on-phrase
as an argument of the verb put.
Reanalysis processes. The recognition that such a wide variety of factors affect sentence
comprehension has provoked several distinct responses. One response was to turn away from
depth-first parsing theories which search for simple principles governing the creation of
structural analyses of sentences and develop theories that examine how all sources of information
are integrated in choosing a preferred analysis from among all the possible analyses. A second
response was to search for grammatical factors other than phrase structure geometries and
argument structures that might play a role in the creation of an initial analysis. These two
responses will be discussed in later sections. A third response was to maintain the need for a
theory of how structural analyses are created but to add additional theoretical claims about how
51
the initial analysis of a sentence is revised in the light of various factors. Rayner, Carlson and
Frazier (1983) is an early example of the third type of response. They explored the possibility
that semantic and plausibility factors would override initial structural preferences. While they did
not find evidence for such an override, they did obtain data that they interpreted to indicate that
semantic factors could trigger the revision of an initial syntactic analysis. For instance, they
found that a sentence like The spy saw the cop with a revolver exhibited disruption in the
prepositional phrase (PP) with a revolver, as if the structurally-simpler analysis in which the PP
modifies the verb were initially constructed despite its implausibility and only then modified to
the more plausible but more complex analysis in which the PP modifies the noun. They posited
the existence of a "thematic processor" that would respond to the existence of a highly plausible
alternative to the structurally-preferred analysis.
Such a thematic processor could be developed to explain how a wide range of factors
affect the ease of recovering from and revising an initial misanalysis. While no explicit and
restricted model exists that successfully explains all the effects of frequency, argument
preference, context, etc. in terms of ease of reanalysis, interesting progress toward such a theory
is being made (see Fodor & Ferreira, 1998, for a collection of papers exploring theories of
reanalysis). A theory of reanalysis must make claims about what kind of information will trigger
a revision of a presumed initial analysis, what kind of information guides the revisions that will
be made, and what kinds of revisions are easy or difficult. It can claim that some revisions take
place so quickly that they are difficult to detect experimentally, while others take substantial time
and cause measurable disruption. Fodor and Frazier (1980; cf. Fodor & Inoue, 1994) made a
“revision as
52
last resort” claim that seems to have stood up quite well. They proposed that, when readers or
listeners are faced with the choice of discarding the grammatical analysis they have built so far
and starting over vs. repairing the existing analysis, they choose the latter. Sturt, Pickering,
Scheepers, and Crocker (2001) and Schneider and Phillips (2001) have provided experimental
support for the claim that revision of an existing analysis is avoided, if possible. They showed
(for example) that the phrase beginning had shot in The troops who discovered the enemy spy
had shot themselves/himself (and) were later mentioned in the press report is initially attached
with The troops as its subject. It is not attached to the more recent phrase enemy spy. From a
perspective that claims the human sentence parser has a strong bias toward attaching new phrases
to the most recent phrase (Phillips & Gibson, 1997; Stevenson, 1994), this is a surprising result.
Presumably, the recency bias is overcome because attaching had shot to the most recent phrase
the enemy spy would require revising the initial analysis of the enemy spy as direct object of
discovered into an analysis in which it is subject of a sentence complement of discovered.
Fodor and Inoue (2000) questioned the “revision as last resort principle” that Fodor and
her colleagues had advanced and that Pickering et al. (2001) and Schneider and Phillips (2001)
argued for. Their reasons for doubting the dominance of this principle appealed primarily to data
from Japanese and to their intuitive judgments of processing difficulty that seem to conflict with
the Pickering et al. and Schneider and Phillips data. Rather than emphasizing the parser’s
reluctance to revise already-built structure during the reanalysis process, Fodor and Inoue (2000)
attempted to interpret evidence for the revision as last resort principle in terms of a very general
principle they termed “minimal everything” (and ultimately, “attach quickly”). All choices, both
in initial analysis and in reanalysis, are made following a very general least effort principle,
53
formulated in a way that attempts to replace earlier models’ explicit reliance on grammatical
licensing of the attachments that are made in the parsing and reanalysis processes.
Case structure. Most research on parsing has focused on English, and in English, nearly
all information relevant to syntactic structure is carried by word order and by the content of
specific lexical items. Modern syntactic theory places substantial emphasis on morphosyntactic
features, including case, number, gender, tense, and aspect, and some languages mark these
features in ways that could in principle be of substantial use to the parser. Consider case, which
many languages mark explicitly. A noun's case (traditionally nominative, accusative, dative, etc.)
is related to what role it plays in a verb's argument structure and in turn to its role in sentence
structure (subject, object of verb, etc.). While English marks case only on pronouns (where he,
she is nominative, her accusative or genitive or dative, etc.), some evidence exist that indicates
that this casemarking is used in parsing English (Traxler & Pickering, 1996b). The casemarking
on the pronoun she in I knew she and her mother would leave the party early seems to block the
normal preference to take a NP after a verb as the direct object of the verb.
Other psycholinguistic researchers have studied case in languages which have much more
elaborate casemarking systems (e.g. Kim, 1999, for Korean, and Yamashita, 1997, for Japanese).
The most-studied system is German. German determiners are marked for nominative, accusative,
dative, and genitive case, but some markings are ambiguous. Further, while the normal word
order in German has subject before object, other orders are possible ("scrambling") and
motivated in part by pragmatic factors such as focus (see Hemforth & Konieczny, 2000, for an
overview). Since German clauses are generally verb-final, it is possible to determine whether the
parser assigns case to an NP even before the verb which is the source of the casemarking is
54
encountered. Bader and Meng (1999) have demonstrated that German readers prefer to assign
subject before object (nominative before accusative case). Consider the following examples:
a. Die Direktorin hat ersählt, dass die neue Lehrerin einige der Kollegen angerufen hat.
The director has said, that the new teacher some the colleagues phoned had.
("The director said that the new teacher phoned some of the colleagues.")
b. Die Direktorin hat ersählt, dass die neue Lehrerin einige der Kollegen angerufen haben.
The director has said, that the new teacher some the colleagues phoned have.
("The director said that some of the colleagues phoned the new teacher.")
The article die in the embedded clause is ambiguous between nominative and accusative, an
ambiguity that is resolved by the number of the final auxiliary verb hat vs haben. Speeded
grammaticality judgments were more accurate when the sentence was singular than when it was
plural, indicating that the singular NP die neue Leherin had initially been assigned nominative
case. Friederici and Mecklinger, 1996, used ERP measurements to reach a similar conclusion.
Bader, Meng, and Bayer (2000) examined the dative case, which is a lexical case needing
a specific lexical licenser (while nominative and accusative cases are generally considered
structural cases). They provided evidence that structural case is preferred over lexical case in
resolving an ambiguity. Their evidence, together with evidence for the existence of preferences
among structural cases, led them to claim that the parser builds a substantial amount of syntactic
structure, based on its knowledge of possible phrase structure geometries, before reaching the
lexical head of a sentence, its main verb.
Prosodic factors in comprehension. Just as most parsing research has been conducted
using English, most has used visual presentation of linguistic materials. Fortunately for the field
55
of psycholinguistics, both of these traditions are beginning to change (see, for example,
Carreiras, Garcia-Albea, & Sebastian-Galles, 1996; Cutler & Clifton, 2000; De Vincenzi &
Lombardo, 2000; Hemforth & Konieczny, 2000; Mazuka & Nagai, 1995). English is just one
language among a great many, and it is important not to mistake phenomena specific to English
as phenomena that stem from the basic nature of the human sentence parsing mechanism. Even
more, speaking and listening are certainly the functions for which our linguistic abilities have
evolved. Writing and reading are derived functions, cultural contributions that must, unlike
speaking and listening, be explicitly taught.
Warren (1996) and Nicol (1996) contain collections that illustrate some of the recent
progress in understanding how prosody can guide comprehension. Much current research is
motivated by recent theoretical analyses of prosody, stemming from research by Pierrehumbert
(1980; cf. Beckman, 1996; Pierrehumbert& Hirschberg, 1990). These analyses claim that
prosody has a structure of its own, constrained by not determined by syntactic structure (Selkirk
1984, 1995). The analyses have been developed into explicit procedures that provide a motivated
way of formulating descriptions of the prosody of individual utterances (ToBI, for Tone,
Boundary and Intonation; Beckman & Elam, 1997).
Early research focused on demonstrating that prosody can disambiguate utterances
(Lehiste, 1973) and on characterizing what kinds of ambiguities can be resolved prosodically
(e.g., Nespor & Vogel, 1986). More recent research has examined the question of whether
appropriate prosody can overcome the effects of parsing biases and block garden paths. Kjelgaard
and Speer (1999; see Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Warren, Grenier, & Lee, 1992, for a precursor)
examined late-closure ambiguities like When Madonna sings the song it's/is a hit. Readers seem
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to take the phrase the song as the direct object of sings, resulting in a garden path when the
sentence continues with the verb is which forces the sentence complement subject analysis of the
song. Kjelgaard and Speer recorded sentences like these with either a disambiguating prosodic
boundary after the NP the song or after the verb sings. The former prosody is appropriate for the
normally-preferred late closure analysis, while the latter is appropriate for an early closure
analysis. Kjelgaard and Speer showed that an appropriate prosody eliminated comprehension
difficulty of the early closure sentences, relative to a baseline condition whose prosody was
appropriate to either interpretation.
Kjelgaard and Speer's claim that prosody determines the initial structuring of an utterance
is reinforced by work done by Schafer (1997; Schafer & Speer, 1997). Schafer proposed a
"prosodic visibility hypothesis" that suggested that listeners form a prosodic package of material
within a single prosodic phrase, and that material within the current prosodic package is more
visible than material outside it. This makes attachment within a prosodic package relatively
preferred. Thus, when a prosodic phrase ends after angered in The bus driver angered 9 the rider
with a mean look, a listener is more likely to take with a mean look to modify rider than when a
prosodic boundary occurs at other points in the utterance.
Schafer, Speer, Warren, and White (2000) demonstrated that these types of prosodic
effects could be seen in spontaneously produced speech. They recorded pairs of speakers and
listeners talking to one another (using constrained sentence structures) while playing a board
game that involved moving pieces from place to place. Their participants used prosodies that
effectively disambiguated their utterance and proved to have phonological properties similar to
those manipulated in Schafer's earlier work.
57
Carlson, Clifton and Frazier (2001) developed Schafer's (1997) arguments that the
effectiveness of a prosodic boundary depends on the global prosodic representation of a sentence,
not just on the local cues. Using a simple auditory questionnaire procedure in which listeners'
interpretations of sentences like Susie learned that John telephoned after Bill visited was elicited,
Carlson et al. determined that the presence of a prosodic break between John telephoned and
after Bill visited could increase the frequency of high attachment interpretations (in which after
Bill visited modifies learned), but only when it was prosodically larger than an earlier break after
learned. The relative, not the absolute, size of the prosodic boundary seems to guide parsing
decisions.
Breadth-first theories of parsing: Constraint-based accounts.
Let us review the material we have covered to this point in our discussion of sentence
comprehension. Some of the phenomena point to a process which arrives at a single structural
description of a sentence in the fastest possible way, presumably in service of quickly getting
some object that can be semantically interpreted. A number of factors have been claimed to guide
this process, including structural simplicity (minimal attachment), recency, frequency of use,
argument preference, referential success, casemarking, and prosody. Some of these factors (e.g.,
minimal attachment vs. argument preference vs. referential success) have been presented as
mutually-inconsistent alternative accounts of overlapping phenomena. Others can play
compatible and complementary roles in a single theory. For instance, a theory that claims that
the most quickly constructed syntactically-acceptable analysis is initially accepted can clearly
permit the reader's or listener's knowledge of permissible syntactic geometries, casemarking, and
prosody, together with the constraints each of these grammatical domains places on the others, to
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work together in creating a syntactic structure.
However, some of the phenomena we have discussed create difficulties for this view of
the parser as a system that follows a depth-first agenda in using a restricted range of grammatical
knowledge to create a single, preferred initial analysis of a sentence. The apparent fact that
context can fully eliminate at least some structural preferences is accommodated only with great
discomfort by a depth-first model, whose only easy response is to say that reanalysis happened
too fast to be seen by any existing experimental technique. Further, much development of
linguistic theory over the past 20 years has emphasized the specific contributions to lexical
information to syntactic structure and de-emphasized rules like phrase-structure rules that specify
which particular structural configurations are permissible. These facts, together with a variety of
empirical phenomena (some of which will be reviewed below) have encouraged some theorists
(including MacDonald et al, 1994, and Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995) to develop lexicalist,
constraint-based theories of parsing. These theories view parsing as a breadth-first process of
weighing the implications that all relevant sources of information (especially lexical sources of
information) have for choosing among all possible structural analyses of a sentence.
One major impetus for the development of lexicalist constraint-based theories was
research done by Tanenhaus and his colleagues on how different types of lexical information
could be combined to influence the interpretation of a sentence (e.g., Carlson & Tanenhaus,
1988; Tanenhaus, Boland, Mauner & Carlson, 1993; Tanenhaus, Garnsey & Boland, 1990). This
work was encouraged by the development of connectionist models (cf. Rumelhart & McClelland,
1986), which provided explicit theoretical mechanisms for analyzing the interaction of multiple
factors. A major goal of research in the lexicalist constraint-based tradition has been to
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demonstrate that multiple sources of information interact in determining the preferred resolution
of a temporary ambiguity.
A good example of the kind of research that encourages this enterprise is found in
Spivey-Knowlton and Sedivy (1995), who measured the self-paced reading time of sentences like
The salesman glanced at a/the customer with suspicion/ripped jeans and then walked away.
These sentences are temporarily ambiguous in terms of where the PP with suspicion/ripped jeans
attaches. Frazier's (1987a) garden-path theory claims that the preferred attachment site is to the
verb glance at, predicting slower reading when the content of the PP forces attachment to the NP
(i.e., when the PP is with ripped jeans). However, Spivey-Knowlton and Sedivy (1995) showed
that the actual preference depended on whether the verb was an action verb (e.g., smash down)
vs. a perception verb such as glance at, and whether the object of the verb was definite or
indefinite (a vs the customer). Precisely the opposite of the garden-path prediction obtained for
perception verbs with an indefinite object, strongly suggesting that a single principle of structural
simplicity cannot account for all parsing preferences.
The connectionist metaphor of a network of connected nodes, transmitting activation to
one another, underlies much constraint-based lexicalist theorizing (cf. MacDonald et al., 1994).
The connectionist emphasis on how connections between nodes are based on experience has
encouraged lexicalist theorists to place a good deal of weight on frequency of experience as an
important factor in sentence comprehension. Psycholinguistic experimentation has provided a
variety of evidence that frequency of different sentence structures does play a role in parsing. For
instance, Trueswell (1996) showed that the ease of understanding sentences like The award
accepted by the man was very impressive was affected by whether the verb is used more often as
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a simple past tense verb or as a passive participle (the verb accept has a relatively high frequency
of use as a passive participle; a verb like entertain does not). More disruption was observed when
the passive participle use required by the sentence was an infrequent usage in the Francis and
Ku era (1982) norms. MacDonald (1994) similarly demonstrated more disruption in reading
sentences containing a reduced relative clause, such as The rancher could see that the nervous
cattle pushed/moved into the crowded pen were afraid of the cowboys, when the verb of the
complement sentence was more often used as an intransitive verb (moved) than when it was used
most frequently as a transitive (pushed).
Not all researchers find clear and immediate effects of the frequency with which a verb is
used in different structures. Ferreira and Henderson (1990) tested an apparently straightforward
prediction of a frequency-based account that the difficulty of a sentence containing a temporary
ambiguity between a direct object and a sentence complement would be reduced when the verb
was most frequently used with sentence complements. They examined eye movements during the
reading of sentences like She suspected/pretended Jack owns credit cards and failed to find initial
reading time effects of the frequency with which the verb took a direct object vs. a sentence
complement; a verb like suspect which infrequently takes a S complement is called an NP-bias
verb, while a verb like pretend which quite frequently takes an S complement is called an S-bias
verb. In response, Trueswell, Tanenhaus and Kello (1993) argued that Ferreira and Henderson
had used implausible NPs as direct objects of their NP-biased verbs, reducing any underlying
processing disadvantage for NP-biased verbs. Trueswell et al. successfully demonstrated faster
first-pass reading time for sentences like The waiter confirmed/insisted the reservation was made
yesterday when the verb was more frequently used with a sentence complement (insisted) than
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when its most frequent use was with a direct object (confirmed). However, Kennison (2001)
countered by saying that Trueswell et al (1993) had themselves confounded plausibility with
frequency by using NP complements of S-biased verbs that were less plausible than the NP
complements of NP-biased verbs. Kennison gathered eyetracking data from sentences in which
plausibility was carefully controlled and found results compatible with those of Ferreira and
Henderson.
Some research suggests that readers may not use relative frequency of the type of
complement a verb takes to guide their initial parsing decisions but may use it very quickly in
arriving at a final analysis. Pickering and Traxler (1998) and Pickering, Traxler and Crocker
(2000) demonstrated that reading of sentences like As the woman sailed the magazine about
fishing amused all the reporters was disrupted very quickly after the eyes landed on the
postverbal noun (magazine) even when the verb was one like hinted that very infrequently is used
with a direct object. As discussed earlier (in the section on Immediacy), this finding suggests that
the noun is initially taken as direct object of the verb in spite of the low frequency of this analysis
and the implausibility of the interpretation of this analysis quickly noted (but cf. Garnsey,
Pearlmutter, Myers & Lotocky, 1997, for some apparently-inconsistent evidence; see Gibson,
Schütze, & Salomon, 1996 and Gibson & Schütze, 1999 for evidence of the inadequacy of
frequency accounts of some other structural preferences; and see Jurafsky, 1996, for a careful and
thoroughgoing analysis of how frequency may in fact play the central role in parsing of a wide
range of constructions).
In addition to empirical results that suggest frequency, while important, may not be the
only important factor in parsing, there are conceptual reasons to question the centrality of
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frequency in a parsing theory. One reason is that no existing theory adequately specifies how to
count frequency, if frequency is treated objectively as the relative frequency with which various
constructions have been experienced. In particular, what "grain size" should be counted? The
frequency with which particular words co-occur? With which a particular word is used in a
specific syntactic construction? With which a class of words is used in a class of equivalent
constructions? See Gibson et al. (1996) and Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley and Brysbaert (1995) for
further discussion of the grain size problem.
A second reason to question the centrality of frequency is the possibility that production
preferences (which determine frequency of experience) and comprehension preferences may be
correlated in some instances because they reflect the operation of common underlying factors
(e.g., structural simplicity). Showing that comprehension difficulty reflects frequency of
experience thus does not mean that one causes the other.
A third reason to be wary of frequency claims is the fact that many experiments
demonstrating effects of frequency actually use production measures of frequency. They have
subjects complete sentence frames using specified words and tabulate the frequency with which
different constructions are used. Merlo (1994) and Roland and Jurafsky (2001) discuss the
relative merits of measuring frequency through corpus counts vs. production norms. Carefullycollected production norms may well do the best job of predicting on-line reading effects (cf.
Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton and Hanna, 2000, for a clear defense of such norms), but the
measures they yield cannot be taken as straightforward measures of the frequency with which
particular structures are experienced (and such norms do not in fact always successfully predict
on-line comprehension results; Clifton, Kennison, & Albrecht, 1997; Liversedge, Patterson, &
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Clayes, 2001).
Even if they are not taken as pure measures of frequency of experience, a constraint-based
theorist can argue that production norm frequencies encode the effects of the many lexical factors
that should affect comprehension difficulty. Demonstrating that normed properties of particular
lexical items, not structural configurations, determine parsing preferences is thus important to the
constraint-based lexicalist enterprise. Such demonstrations gain particular value when they are
interpreted in explicit, implemented models of parsing decisions, as has been done by Tanenhaus
and his colleagues (McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Spivey & Tanenhaus, 1998;
Tanenhaus et al., 2000). These models are simple networks for choosing between pairs of
analyses (e.g., relative clause vs. main clause, as in The defendant/evidence examined by the
lawyer turned out to be unreliable) and permit the theorist to compute the explicit consequences
of production norm and corpus frequencies together with any other factors the theorist wishes to
consider. The models do a good job of fitting reading time measures of sentences that are
resolved in favor of the normally-unpreferred analysis, e.g., the reduced relative clause analysis
of the sentence just quoted. For instance, they nicely predict the pattern of results obtained by
Trueswell, Tanenhaus and Garnsey (1994), who found that using the inanimate subject The
evidence in sentences like the one under discussion (a subject that independent norms rated as a
good theme but poor agent of the verb examine) eliminated the reading difficulty observed when
the subject was The defendant.1 Some evidence exists, however, that shows that the models fail
1
Note, Ferreira & Clifton, 1986, who initially measured reading of the ...evidence
examined.... sentence and others like it, did not find that inanimacy of the subject eliminated
reading disruption. However, Trueswell et al. argued that not all of the Ferreira & Clifton
sentences had strong enough lexical biases against the normally-preferred main clause
interpretation.
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to predict the data from sentences that are resolved in favor of the normally-preferred (main
clause) analysis (Binder, Duffy, & Rayner, 2001). The models predict that a context that favors
the reduced relative clause interpretation should impair reading of the main clause version, but no
such impairment is observed.
Constraint-based theories are not limited to lexical factors. They have readily
incorporated evidence (discussed earlier) that discourse context can affect reading difficulty and
perhaps guide parsing decisions. Discourse context is treated as just another constraint on parsing
(cf. McRae et al., 1998). More than this, constraint-based theories have encouraged
experimenters to search for previously-unidentified discourse effects that might affect parsing
decisions. For instance, Altmann and Kamide (1999) have used head-mounted eyetracking
techniques to determine how quickly stereotyped knowledge of appropriate objects is used in
determining the reference of phrases. Their subjects observed a scene on a video display and
judged the appropriateness of an auditory sentence describing the scene. The eyes moved faster
to a relevant target when the verb in the sentence was thematically appropriate to the target item.
For instance, when subjects heard The boy will eat the cake their eyes moved more quickly to a
picture of a cake than when they heard The boy will move the cake. Even though this finding
does not bear directly on the questions of how ambiguity is resolved that have been the focus of
discussion throughout most of this section, it does suggest that listeners very quickly use all their
knowledge about specific lexical items in arriving at an interpretation of an utterance.
A final word before concluding this section: Constraint-based lexicalist models of
sentence processing have spurred major contributions to our understanding of the topic. They
have prompted experimenters to broaden the range of factors they consider in searching for
65
influences on the process of comprehension, and they have prompted theorists to formulate
explicit models of how a wide range of information is integrated in choosing among alternative
analyses of a sentence. But in doing so, most have given up or sidestepped one of the original
goals of parsing theories: to formulate an explicit account of how the parser creates the structure
that permits a sentence to be interpreted. As their creators recognize, the models of McRae et al.
(1998) and Spivey and Tanenhaus (1998) assume that two (or more) alternative structural
analyses of a sentence are available. The models simply describe how the choice between these
analyses is made without specifying what makes the analyses available. Other models (e.g.,
MacDonald et al., 1994) propose that the structure of a clause is projected from its head, the verb.
This suggestion is inadequate for a number of reasons (cf. Frazier, 1995), most centrally the fact
that in perhaps half the languages of the world the verb is the final element of a clause but there
is good reason to doubt that their users wait until the end of clauses to begin parsing sentences.
Future parsing theories will, one hopes, correct the shortcomings of both the depth-first
structurally-based theories and the breadth-first constraint-based theories. One possible move
would be to assume structural representations that are less dependent on heads of phrases and
more amenable to being constructed or activated on the basis of a range of linguistic input.
Crocker (1995), Jurafsky (1996) and Vosse and Kempen (2000) can be seen as instances of this
approach. Another possible move would be to integrate the depth-first and breadth-first models
as they have been developed, permitting more immediate interaction between construction of an
initial analysis and its evaluation than has been emphasized in depth-first approaches (cf. Frazier,
1990, as one example of such an attempt).
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Long-distance dependencies.
The research discussed to this point has focused on how a reader or listener determines
that relations between phrases that are contiguous in a sentence. Consider, however, sentences
like What did you read last night and The book I read was by José Saramago and That book was
exciting to read. In all these cases, the relation a reader must discover involves the verb read and
a distant element (what or the/that book). Discovering this relation poses a substantial challenge
to a reader or listener, because the dependency that must be discovered can involve arbitrarily
distant elements (e.g., The book that the man from the small town said that he always told his
mother that he intended to read was by José Saramago).
Currently dominant linguistic analyses describe sentences like these as having an empty
element, a trace, in the position where the "moved" element has to be interpreted (e.g., What is
the moved element, and t is the trace in What did you read t last night). Other analyses are
possible (see Pickering & Barry, 1991, for a brief survey including psychological implications).
Influenced by the dominant view, psycholinguists asked how the human sentence parser
discoveres the relation between the moved element, or "filler," and the trace, or "gap." Fodor
(1978) analyzed the logical possibilities (e.g., delay assignment of an identified filler to a gap as
long as possible) and Frazier (1987b) provided evidence that the preferred strategy was actually
to identify the gap position as soon as possible. She presented evidence that Dutch sentences like
Karl hielp de mijnwerkers die (t) de boswachter (t) vonden/vond (Karl helped the mineworkers
who the forester found plural/singular) were read faster when the number of the final verb was
consistent with the early gap (t) position than when it was consistent with the later gap position.
That is, extraction from the position of the subject of the final verb was preferred over extraction
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from object position (cf. Clifton & Frazier, 1989, Fodor, 1989, Stowe, 1986, and Tanenhaus,
Boland, Mauner & Carlson, 1993, for discussion of other lines of evidence). DeVincenzi (1991)
generalized Frazier’s (1987b) "active filler principle" as the "minimal chain principle" (attempt to
minimize the lengths of any chain linking a moved element to its trace). She further showed how
this principle followed the same underlying logic as minimal attachment and late closure,
namely, find the first available analysis.
Tanenhaus et al (1993) argued that a purely syntactic version of the active filler or
minimal chain principles is not the whole story. They developed a “thematic filling” hypothesis
in which a filler is semantically interpreted as soon as a reader or listener encounters the verb to
which it is related, without waiting for the gap position (cf. Pickering & Barry, 1991). They
provided evidence for this using a “stops making sense” (incremental unacceptability) task and
demonstrated that readers begin rejecting an implausible sentence like Which public library did
John contribute some cheap liquor to t last week on the word liquor, before even encountering
the word to that licenses the gap position. Results like those of Tanenhaus et al illustrate the
point made earlier, that the process of comprehending sentences with long distance dependencies
is a complex and subtle one that discourages hope of simplistic models of the sentence
comprehension process.
Text and discourse comprehension
The nature of the task.
The core use of a sentence is to convey a message, to express meaningful content. All the
parsing mechanisms discussed in the previous section operate in service of this function. Only a
small fraction of the research on sentence processing emphasizes how listeners and readers
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process the meaning of sentences they encounter. The research discussed earlier showing
effectively immediate interpretation of sentences constitutes one example, as does research
examining how context or preferred thematic structures affects parsing. A few instances of recent
research tackle the problems of semantic processing of individual sentences head-on (e.g.,
Piñango, Zurif & Jackendof, 1999, and McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, & Jackendof, 2001,
examining how listeners determine the event structures of predicates, and Frazier, 1999,
examining how readers determine the scope of quantifiers). But most psycholinguistic research
that has concerned meaning above the level of the word has concentrated on how readers
understand texts and connected discourse.
Readers (and listeners) faced with connected discourse have a number of challenging
tasks. Among other things, they must determine the reference of referring expressions, especially
pronouns and NPs, including determining whether the expression introduces a new entity into the
discourse or picks out an existing one. They must determine how any assertion made by one
sentence is related to previous assertions. They must (or at least, may) determine what
unexpressed assertions follow as implications of what was read. And, according to many
researchers, they must create a nonlinguistic representation of the content of what they are
reading, a representation that supports the functions of determining reference, relevance, and
implications. We will briefly review some core findings about some of these tasks (for
discussions of inference, which will not be treated here, see Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994;
McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992, 1995; Singer, 1994).
Determination of reference.
Psycholinguists have just begun to examine how a reader or listener picks out the real69
world referent of a word or phrase in an ongoing discourse. A promising beginning appears in
research mentioned earlier measuring eye movements across an array of objects being talked
about (Allopena, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1999; Tanenhaus et al., 1995). These researchers
found that the speed of determining the referent of a word (as indexed by how quickly the eyes
moved to that referent) is affected by the presence of other objects whose names could be
confused with the word denoting the referent. For instance, the speed with which their eyes
moved to a candle upon hearing a word beginning can... was slowed by the presence of candy in
the array. Similarly, they fixated more rapidly on a tall glass when given the instruction touch the
tall glass if the array contained a contrasting object, a short glass. Apparently, listeners
interpreted the adjective tall as introducing a contrast with another object in the array and were
prepared to interpret a NP as referring to the appropriate member of the contrast.
The bulk of research on how readers and listeners determine reference has focused on
anaphoric reference. Pronouns, definite NPs, VP ellipsis, and a variety of other linguistic devices
can be used to make reference to an entity or event introduced elsewhere in a discourse, and the
use of these devices seems to play an important role in making discourse coherent (Garrod &
Sanford, 1994; Grosz & Sidner, 1986). The primary experimental questions that have been asked
concern the process of identifying the antecedent of an anaphor and the nature of the
representation in which the antecedent is found.
Early research on the comprehension of pronouns emphasized how a reader or listener
had to search for the antecedent of an anaphor (Clark & Sengul, 1979; Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983).
Later research emphasized how certain antecedents are highly available and how processing is
disrupted when a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-available antecedent (e.g., Clifton &
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Ferreira, 1987). This approach has been developed most elegantly by Gordon and his colleagues
(e.g., Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993; Gordon & Scarce, 1995). They analyzed the availability
of different potential antecedents in terms of centering theory (Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1983,
1995), and found that a pronoun whose antecedent occurs in a preceding sentence is
comprehended most quickly when its antecedent is a highly-favored "forward-looking center" of
that sentence, e.g., its grammatical subject or the first-mentioned entity. Such a pronoun is
termed the "backward-looking center" of the sentence that contains it. Gordon and his colleagues
(e.g., Gordon & Chan, 1995) also found a reading time penalty for using a repeated name rather
than a pronoun (the "repeated name penalty") in the position of the backward looking center, but
not in other sentence positions. For instance, following the sentence Susan decided to give Fred a
hamster, reading time of Susan told him exactly what do feed it was slowed compared to She told
him....
It is tempting to conclude that an appropriate use of a pronoun signals reference to a
structurally-defined antecedent, namely, an entity mentioned as topic or center of a preceding
sentence. But this overlooks other factors that influence the interpretation of pronouns. For
instance, Chambers and Smyth (1998) found that a pronoun in direct object position was most
readily interpreted as picking out the direct object of the preceding sentence as its antecedent, and
they also found a repeated name penalty for an entity whose antecedent occurred in a
syntactically parallel position in the previous sentence. The repeated name penalty disappeared
when the name or pronoun occurred in a syntactic position that was not parallel to its antecedent,
contrary to centering theory. For example, following Martin Miles told Liz Lovejoy to check the
oil, reading of Then Dean Morgan told her/Liz Lovejoy to inspect the coolant was slower when
71
the object was Liz Lovejoy than when it was her. However, this repeated name penalty was not
found when the final sentence was Then Dean Morgan told him/Martin Miles to inspect the
coolant.
There has been some debate about how quickly the antecedent of a pronoun is determined
in reading or listening (see, e.g., Greene, McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). Ehrlich and Rayner's (1983)
eyetracking results have been used to argue that resolution is far from immediate, but their
evidence for this conclusion came from sentences in which the antecedent of the pronoun was not
readily available, certainly not an appropriate antecedent according to centering theory. In
another eyetracking study, Garrod, Freudenthal and Boyle (1994) provided evidence that under
some very limited conditions interpretation of a pronoun was essentially immediate. They
showed immediate disruption of reading on the verb in sentences like Right away she poured a
large glass of coke when the pronoun unambiguously referred to a focused antecedent (i.e., in
this case, the female participant had been mentioned in a focused or centered position) and when
the verb denoted an incongruent action (the female participant was a passenger and the male
steward should have been pouring).
We have been discussing the interpretation of pronouns as if the antecedent of a pronoun
is a linguistic object, to be found in the text. This is actually likely to be incorrect (see Garnham,
1999). Garnham argues that the antecedent of an anaphoric expression refers to an element in a
mental model, a nonlinguistic conceptual representation. This is an attractive position in that it
accounts for a variety of otherwise-puzzling pheneomena. For instance, in Gernsbacher's (1991)
"conceptual pronouns," illustrated in I need a plate. Where do you keep them?, the referent of
them is clearly not the plate that is needed, but instead is an inferred set of plates that the
72
addressee is assumed to have. Another example is Garnham and Oakhill's (1988) demonstration
of the acceptability of reference into anaphoric islands, as in Jim reviewed that book and it will
be published in Linguistic Inquiry. The referent of it is Jim's review, an inferred product of the
act of reviewing that was described.
The position that at least some anaphors find their referents in a mental model has been
extensively examined in the case of VP anaphors. Hankamer and Sag (1976) discuss "deep" vs.
"surface" anaphors (termed "interpretive anaphors" and "ellipses" in Sag & Hankamer, 1984). A
deep anaphor can be used with or without a linguistic antecedent. Consider a scene where Joe's
wife Mary notices that the garbage is, surprisingly, taken out, and Joe says I did it. This
interchange is perfectly acceptable. However, it would have been at least a little odd for Joe to
have used a surface anaphor and said I did, even though this utterance would have been perfect as
a reply to the question Who took out the garbage? There is some evidence that deep and surface
VP anaphors are processed differently (Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1990), but there is also evidence
that surface form is not irrelevant to the processing of deep VP anaphors (Murphy, 1985).
Similarly, in the case of pronouns, which are considered to be deep anaphors, Garnham, Oakhill,
Ehrlich and Carreiras (1995) showed faster resolution of the antecedent of pronouns in Spanish
and French when gender disambiguation was available, even when the gender of the antecedent
was purely formal. This means that the linguistic properties of the antecedent affected
comprehension, and suggests that the antecedent is not likely to be purely an object in a
nonlinguistic conceptual representation.
Text structure.
Text comprehension became a major subfield of cognitive psychology largely through the
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efforts of Kintsch (1974; Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978). Kintsch has proposed a series of models of
the process by which the propositions that make up the semantic interpretations of individual
sentences are integrated into such larger structures as text bases and situation models. His models
described ways in which readers could abstract the main threads of a discourse and infer missing
connections, guided by how arguments overlapped across propositions and by linguistic cues
signaled by the text and constrained by limitations of short-term store.
Much of Kintsch's work assumed that a reader retrieved information from earlier in the
text (information that had been consigned to long-term memory) or from world knowledge only
when it was required to interpret a portion of the text which could not be interpreted purely on
the basis of local connections. Such long-term memory information contributed to structuring the
text only through an effortful and time-consuming process of memory search, triggered by a local
coherence break. Current research (including Kintsch's 1988 Construction-Integration model)
suggests, in contrast, that a reader or listener regularly makes contact with long-term memory in
the process of identifying, evaluating, and expanding on the structure of a discourse.
Some research emphasizes how retrieval of information from long-term memory can be a
passive automatic process that occurs automatically throughout comprehension (e.g, McKoon &
Ratcliff, 1992, 1998; McKoon, Gerrig & Green, 1996; Myers & O'Brien, 1998). In the Myers
and O'Brien "Resonance" model, information in long-term memory is automatically activated by
the presence in short-term memory of material that bears an apparently-rough and approximate
semantic relation to it. Semantic details, including factors such as negation that drastically
change the truth of propositions, do not seem to affect the resonance process. One illustrative
piece of evidence for such a process comes from Albrecht and O'Brien (1993). They had subjects
74
read long passages that introduced a character, Mary, as a strict vegetarian. Six sentences after
this introduction, a sentence asserted that Mary ordered a cheesburger. Even though this sentence
was locally coherent with the preceding few sentences, it was read slowly. O'Brien, Rizella,
Albrecht and Halleran (1998) showed the same effect even if the intervening material contained a
statement that said Mary was no longer a vegetarian. It appears that the concept of vegetarian was
activated by the statement about a cheeseburger, and the apparent inconsistency between the
concepts involved slowed reading even if other material that an "intelligent" and strategic process
could have used to cancel the conflict had been stated in the text.
Other recent research has emphasized a more active and intelligent search after meaning
as the basis by which a reader discovers the conceptual structure of a discourse. Graesser et al.
(1994) argued that a reader of a narrative text attempts to build a representation of the causal
structure of the text, analyzing events in terms of goals, actions, and reactions. Suh and Trabasso
(1993) showed the importance of goals, especially unsatisfied goals, in comprehending a text. If a
goal is unsatisfied (e.g., if Jimmy wants a new bicycle, does not receive one as a gift, and then
goes to a store with money he has earned), the goal (the bicycle) is more available than if the goal
had been satisfied (if Jimmy's mother had given him a bicycle as a gift).
This sensitivity to goal-satisfaction seems to contrast with the crude similarity-based
activation that seems to underlie the resonance process discussed earlier. It may be that a
resonance process serves as a first stage in processing a text (Rizzella & O'Brien, 1996) and that
various reading objectives and details of text structure determine whether or not a reader goes
further and searches for a coherent goal structure for the text. Such a perspective at least offers a
way of thinking about the peculiar observation (Barton & Sanford, 1993) that readers are
75
perfectly willing to attempt to solve the problem of where to bury the survivors in the context of
a description of a plane crash on the French-Spanish border. They do not necessarily probe
beyond sheer resonance to recognize that it is inappropriate to bury survivors.
Mental models.
Even if readers and listeners sometimes miss the point, they generally do manage to reach
some conclusion about what a text or discourse was about. They construct a model that is not
clearly linguistic, a mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983) or situation model (van Dijk & Kintsch,
1983). The model represents the causal, spatial, temporal and other relations among the events
and entities described in the text. We have already introduced the notion of a mental model in the
context of comprehending pronouns, advancing Garnham's (1999) suggestion that the referent of
a pronoun is found in a mental model. Garnham (1987) provided demonstrations that other NPs
find their reference in a mental model, and in fact that discourse had to be understood with
respect to a mental model, not just a representation of the form of the discourse. For instance, in
the context of a passage that included the sentence By the window was a man with a martini,
listeners systematically confused a later sentence from the passage The man standing by the
window shouted to the host with The man with the martini shouted to the host in an unexpected
memory test.
Some researchers have gone beyond demonstrating the necessity of a mental model and
attempted to explore what a mental model contains that a reader uses in comprehension. For
example, O'Brien and Albrecht (1992) reported that readers were slowed in reading a sentence
that conflicted with an earlier sentence about the location of a protagonist. For instance, in a
passage beginning with a statement that located the protagonist, Kim, with respect to a health
76
club, the sentence ....when she saw the instructor come in the door of the club was read faster
when Kim had been placed inside the club than when she was outside. Note that this particular
manipulation was successful only when readers were instructed to take the perspective of the
protagonist. They argued that readers keep track of the spatial location of protagonists in a
narrative, information that is naturally represented in a mental model but not in a representation
of the language used in the discourse. Glenberg, Meyer, and Lindem (1987) reached a similar
conclusion on the basis of probes of entities mentioned in a discourse, showing faster responses
to probes of entities that were physically close to the currently-focused protagonist than entities
that were further away.
A text can contain cues that help a reader construct a mental model. For instance,
connectives such as because, later, meanwhile, next day, .... provide information very relevant to
constructing a mental model. Zwaan (1996) showed some apparent processing cost to creating a
new time frame in a mental model. In the context of reading a text about Maurice shaking hands
at the opening of his new art gallery, a sentence stating that he became very pale was read more
slowly when it was introduced by the adverbial connective a day later than by the connective a
moment later. Bestgen and Vonk (2000) found that a sentence that shifted topic in a passage
(e.g., the French version of the sentence I took my moped from the garage, in the context of
cooking dinner in a kitchen) was read more slowly than when the same sentence was read in the
context taking a trip in the country. However, in superficial contrast to Zwaan’s (1996) result,
this topic shift effect disappeared when the topic-shifting sentence began with a temporal
adverbial like Around 11 o’clock, serving as a segmentation marker.
One problem in relying on mental models in developing an account of text and discourse
77
comprehension is that existing notions of mental models are rather amorphous, powerful
representational devices. This may be unavoidable, if a mental model is taken to be a
representation of whatever an individual represents about the world. Psycholinguists may find it
useful to develop more constrained theories of mental models, tuned more precisely to the needs
of representing discourses. Interesting suggestions about how to proceed exist in the literature on
formal semantics (e.g., Barwise & Perry's 1983 Situation Semantics, Heim's 1982, 1983 File
Card Semantics and Kamp & Reyle's 1992 Discourse Representation Theory). These theories
have in fact stimulated the development of theories of mental models (cf. Garnham, 1999), and
one can hope that some of their formal rigor will find its way into theories of how a reader or
listener accomplishes the task of mapping speech or text onto meaning.
Summary
In this chapter, we have provided a general overview of language comprehension, from
the comprehension of words to sentence and text comprehension. We discussed results of
research using both reading and listening (though it is fair to say that there has been more work
on the comprehension of written language than spoken language). Along the way, we have
mentioned a number of influential models of each of these different aspects of comprehension.
There are now fully implemented models of word recognition, both in the visual domain
(Coltheart et al., 1993, 2001; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) and the auditory domain
(McClelland & Elman, 1996; Norris et al., 2000), and there are implemented models of sentence
parsing (McRae et al., 1998; Spivey & Tanenhaus, 1998; Vosse & Kempen, 2000) and text
comprehension (Kintsch, 1988; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Myers & O’Brien, 1998). There are
also implemented models of eye movement control in reading in relation to word processing
78
(Reichle et al., 1998). What is missing, not only in terms of implemented models, but in terms of
general models or theories of language comprehension, are efforts to account for the interaction
of word, sentence, and discourse comprehension (and how such activities interact with eye
movement control in reading). This will not be an easy task -- see, for example, Just and
Carpenter’s (1980) attempt to account for these different mental activities in a general model.
However, our increasing knowledge of the empirical facts about reading and listening will
hopefully make it possible that an all-encompassing model of language comprehension will be
developed in the near future.
79
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Acknowledgments
Preparation of this chapter was supported by a Research Scientist Award to the first
author (MH01255) and by Grants HD17246, HD18708, and HD26765 from the National
Institute of Health.
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Table 1: Structural attachment ambiguities for which garden-pathing has been experimentally
demonstrated (after Frazier & Clifton, 1996)
a. Main clause/reduced relative: The horse raced past the barn (fell).
b. NP vs. S complement: John knew the answer to the physics problem was wrong /very well.
c. direct object vs. subject of S2: While Mary was mending the sock (it) fell off her lap.
d. NP conjunction vs. Sent conjunction: Jacob kissed Miriam and her sister (laughed).
e. PP attachment to VP/NP: Sandra wrote a letter to Mary.
f. complement/relative clause: John told the girl that Bill liked the story.
g. attachment of NP as second object/relative on first object: Fred gave the man the dog (bit the
package).
h. purpose clause vs. rationale clause: Nixoni bought a 1960's version of Trivial Pursuitj
(proj/proi) to amuse his friends.
i. attachment of PP to lower clause/higher clause: I put the book that you were reading in the
library (into my briefcase).
j. attachment of S to lower clause/higher clause: Fred will realize that Mary left when the party
starts/started.
k. attachment of Adverb to lower clause/higher clause We remembered that the assignment will
be due yesterday/tomorrow.
l. left branching vs. right branching N-N compound The [butter cream] factory / The concrete
[cream factory].
m. (In Italian) prefer pro to trace reading, supporting the Minimal Chain Principle: Ha chiamato
Giovanni. ("Giovianni has called," or "Someone has called Giovanni.")
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Figure Captions
Figure 1. Examples of eye-contingent display change paradigms. The top line shows a line of
normal text. In the Moving Window example, a window of readable text (in the example
extending 9 letter spaces to the left and to the right of the fixation point) is available on
each fixation (with letters outside the window replaced by x’s). Two consecutive
fixations are shown. In the Boundary example, the word tune is initially present in the
text, but when the reader’s eye movement crosses an invisible boundary location, tune
changes to song. In the Fast Priming example, a nonword letter string (rcsp) initially
occupies the target word location, but when the reader’s eye movement crosses the
boundary location, the prime word tune is presented for about 30-35 ms and then replaced
by the target word song (which is visible for the rest of the trial).
Figure 2. A Dual-route model of word recognition of Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, and Haller
(1993). Copyright 1993 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced by
permission.
Figure 3. A Connectionist model of word recognition of Seidenberg and McClelland (1989).
Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced by permission.
Figure 4. A sample display in the word superiority effect paradigm.
Figure 5. Successive structures created by application of phrase structure rules.
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Normal Text:
John composed a new song for the children
Moving Window:
xxxx xxxxxxxd a new song for thx xxxxxxx
*
xxxx xxxxxxxx x xew song for the chixxxxx
*
Boundary:
John composed a new tune for the children
*
John composed a new song for the children
*
Fast Priming:
John composed a new rcsp for the children
*
John composed a new tune for the children
*
John composed a new song for the children
*
111
112
113
C
Fixation point
word
Stimulus display
d
####
k
Response choices
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1.
S
f
NP
f
John
2.
S
f
NP
V
f
John
h
saw
3. Access templates:
VP
g
V
S
f
NP
4.
h
VP
S
f
NP
f
John
h
VP
h
V
h
saw
115