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Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly

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Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of these experiments suggest that there is little or no delay in pragmatic processing relative to syntactic processing in the comprehension of unambiguous sentences. This narrows the possible explanations for any delays that are observed in the use of pragmatic information for ambiguity resolution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CUNY Graduate Center, 10036, New York, New York

    Janet Dean Fodor

  2. University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, Maryland

    Stephen Crain

  3. University of Connecticut, 06269, Storrs, Connecticut

    Donald Shankweiler

  4. Haskins Laboratories, 270 Crown St., 06511, New Haven, Connecticut

    Janet Dean Fodor, Weijia Ni, Stephen Crain & Donald Shankweiler

Authors
  1. Janet Dean Fodor
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  2. Weijia Ni
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  3. Stephen Crain
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  4. Donald Shankweiler
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Additional information

The research reported in this paper was supported by Program Project Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institutes of Child and Human Development, and in part by a grant to Stephen Crain and Donald Shankweiler from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. We thank Jacques Mehler and Gerry Altmann for helpful information about speech compression algorithms. We are especially grateful to Ignatius Mattingly for his generous expert advice on speech compression and design of the experimental materials, and also for recording all the speech stimuli. Julie Boland, Brian McElree, Janet Nicol, and Martin Pickering provided very helpful advice on an earlier draft.

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Fodor, J.D., Ni, W., Crain, S. et al. Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly. J Psycholinguist Res 25, 25–57 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708419

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