SENTENCE PROCESSING AND DISCOURSE CONTEXT

ABSTRACT The time course of sentence comprehension subprocesses is investigated in order to assess whether the parser is strictly syntactic in its early phases or whether semantic, pragmatic and discursive information is quickly accessed in time to influence the syntactic analysis. Two experimental studies are reported testing speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, to assess the effects of discursive context in sentence processing. The first experiment revisits the processing of ambiguously attached Prepositional Phrases and finds effects of the previous discourse only in the final off-line measures, which monitor interpretation. The second experiment uses the eye-tracking technique to gauge the antecedent search for the subject of clauses with inflected infinitive verbs, detecting effects of the previous discourse both in the final off-line measure and in the on-line gaze fixation average times. Possible reasons for differences between the effects of discursive information in the two experiments are discussed.