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Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

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(10) How many of each animal species did Moses put on the Ark?<br />

(11) Can a man marry his widow's sister?<br />

(12) After an air-crash where should the survivors be buried?<br />

Bad scores in error detection (i.e. high rate of answering '2' to the question (10)) are<br />

explained as shallow processing of word meanings. Only a part of the word meaning is<br />

actually processed.<br />

Finally, on the discourse level shallow processing is corroborated by the sentence<br />

interpretations that should be ruled out by grammar. Speakers understand as analog<br />

following two sentences (San<strong>for</strong>d & Sturt, 2002: 384):<br />

(13) No head injury is too small to be ignored.<br />

(14) No missile is too small to be banned.<br />

If we re<strong>for</strong>mulate these sentences, the sentence (14) would be:<br />

(14') No matter how small it is, a missile should be banned.<br />

Re<strong>for</strong>mulating (13) in an analogous way would give<br />

(13') No matter how small it is, a head injury should be ignored.<br />

This is, of course, not what listeners recognize as a meaning of the sentence (13); quite<br />

the opposite<br />

(13'') No matter how small it is, a head injury should not be ignored.<br />

This is explained by the interference of world knowledge or context in the<br />

comprehension. The idea is that the parser's output is loose enough to allow these, strictly<br />

speaking, grammatically illicit interpretations. This interference of world knowledge (i.e.<br />

the sentence interpretation based on the knowledge and not on the grammatical structure<br />

29

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