ABSTRACT

Listeners can successfully interpret the intended meaning of an utterance even when it contains errors or other unexpected anomalies. The present work combines an online measure of attention to sentence referents (visual world eye-tracking) with offline judgments of sentence meaning to disclose how the interpretation of anomalous sentences unfolds over time in order to explore mechanisms of non-literal processing. We use a metalinguistic judgment in Experiment 1 and an elicited imitation task in Experiment 2. In both experiments, we focus on one morphosyntactic anomaly (Subject-verb agreement; The key to the cabinets literally *were … ) and one semantic anomaly (Without; Lulu went to the gym without her hat ?off) and show that non-literal referents to each are considered upon hearing the anomalous region of the sentence. This shows that listeners understand anomalies by overwriting or adding to an initial interpretation and that this occurs incrementally and adaptively as the sentence unfolds.

摘要

即使话语包含错误或其他意外异常，听者也可以成功地解释话语的预期含义。目前的工作结合了对句子所指对象的在线注意力测量（视觉世界眼动追踪）与句子含义的离线判断，以揭示异常句子的解释如何随着时间的推移而展开，以探索非文字处理的机制。我们在实验 1 中使用元语言判断，在实验 2 中使用引出模仿任务。在这两个实验中，我们专注于一个形态句法异常（主语-动词一致；橱柜的钥匙字面意思是 * 是…… ）和一个语义异常（没有；露露不戴帽子去健身房？脱下）并表明在听到句子的异常区域时会考虑每个的非文字指称。这表明听众通过覆盖或添加到初始解释来理解异常，并且随着句子的展开，这种情况会逐渐且适应性地发生。