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Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension
Published on: January 10, 2014
The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension
R Thornton1, M C MacDonald, J E Arnold
1University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-2520, USA. thornton@gizmo.usc.edu
Abstract:
Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.
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