"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., "The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…"). If comprehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., "requested") when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001314 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
L2 Arabic learners' processing of Arabic garden-path sentences: a consistent reading pattern.
Front Psychol
March 2024
Department of Curriculum & Instruction, School of Education, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent the L2 Arabic learners' reading process is affected by the incomplete representation of speech (the absence of short vowels and diacritics) while reading ambiguous sentences (garden path sentences).
Method: With a self-paced reading software program, 41 non-native male students, aged from 22 to 26, enrolled in King Saud University, participated in reading 44 sentences (followed by reading comprehension questions) representing three reading conditions, plain, vowelized-discretized, and wrongly-vowelized.
Results: For the reading times data, the analysis revealed that the GP structure had a significant effect on the reading processes of L2 Arabic learners; it took them longer to read the GP sentences than their non-GP counterparts.
Causality and signalling of garden-path sentences.
Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci
March 2024
Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK.
Sheaves are mathematical objects that describe the globally compatible data associated with open sets of a topological space. Original examples of sheaves were continuous functions; later they also became powerful tools in algebraic geometry, as well as logic and set theory. More recently, sheaves have been applied to the theory of contextuality in quantum mechanics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe lab discovered: Place-for-institution metonyms appearing in subject position are processed as agents.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
July 2024
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTracking the time-course of spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese in sentence context: Evidence from eye movements.
Psychon Bull Rev
June 2024
Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR.
In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the effects of sentence context and tonal information on spoken word recognition processes in Cantonese Chinese. We recruited 60 native Cantonese listeners to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. The target words (phonologically similar words) were manipulated to either (1) a congruent context or (2) an incongruent context in the experiment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGarden-path sentences and the diversity of their (mis)representations.
PLoS One
July 2023
Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Previous studies have reliably shown that the initial misanalysis of garden-path sentences lingers even after the whole sentence is processed. However, other aspects of the resulting representation of these sentences are far from being clear. Some authors argue that comprehenders form a full analysis of the sentence which is faithful to the input and that the fact that the misanalysis lingers is due to an inhibition failure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!