Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at the syntax-semantics interface

This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion--in addition to syntactic composition--is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically transparent counterpart, a string that provides for an interpretable representation via syntactic composition alone. The prediction of a higher computational cost for this process is borne out by the results.