Abstract

So-called “depth charge” sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field ( Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction ( Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.

中文翻译：

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四重负反转？深度电荷句的在线处理

抽象的

绝大多数说话者将所谓的“深度冲刺”句子（没有头部受伤太琐碎而不能忽略）解释为与他们的成分语义所规定的相反。这种类型的句子所观察到的语义反转是该领域已知的最强烈和最持久的语言错觉（Wason＆Reich，1979）。但是，最近有人认为，首选解释的产生不是因为处理系统的普遍故障，而是因为非构成的含义以存储结构的形式被语法化了（Cook＆Stevenson，2010； Fortuin，2014） ）。在一系列的五个实验中，我们调查了深度电荷效应是否可以更好地解释为内存超载导致的处理失败（重载假设）或存在具有两个可用含义的基础语法化构造（歧义假设）。据我们所知，我们的实验是第一个探索深度指控句子的在线处理过程的实验。总体而言，数据与歧义性和超载假设的特定变体一致，同时提供了针对其他变体的证据。作为超负荷假说的扩展，我们建议两个启发式过程，当出于战略原因而暂停进行合成处理时，这些启发式过程最终可能会产生错误的读数。