Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: evidence from either...or.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Understanding how readers process complex sentence structures is crucial for theories of language comprehension.
• Coordination structures (NP-coordination and S-coordination) present unique parsing challenges.
• The role of predictive cues in syntactic processing remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing advantages conferred by the predictive cue 'either' in sentences with coordination.
• To examine whether 'either' influences the analysis of sentence structures, specifically S-coordination.
• To test parsing theories that propose early syntactic structure building based on predictions.

Main Methods:

• Eye movements of readers were monitored while they read sentences containing either NP-coordination or S-coordination.
• The presence or absence of the word 'either' prior to the coordination structure was manipulated.
• Reading times for specific sentence regions were analyzed to infer processing efficiency and parsing decisions.

Main Results:

• The presence of 'either' led to faster reading of the material following 'or' in both NP-coordination and S-coordination.
• Readers were more likely to misanalyze S-coordination as NP-coordination when 'either' was absent.
• The word 'either' facilitated prediction and accurate parsing of coordination structures.

Conclusions:

• The word 'either' acts as a predictive cue, enhancing the processing of upcoming coordination structures.
• Predictive activation aids comprehension and helps avoid structural misanalyses, particularly in S-coordination.
• Findings support parsing models where the language parser actively builds syntactic structures in anticipation of lexical input.