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Updated: Jul 17, 2026

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language
Published on: October 13, 2018
Evidence for serial coercion: a time course analysis using the visual-world paradigm
Christoph Scheepers1, Frank Keller, Mirella Lapata
1Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK. c.scheepers@psy.gla.ac.uk
Abstract:
Metonymic verbs like start or enjoy often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started the picture) although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started painting the picture). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or coerced) into an event to conform to the verb's semantic restrictions. Psycholinguistic research has provided evidence for this kind of enriched composition: readers experience processing difficulty when faced with metonymic constructions compared to non-metonymic controls. However, slower reading times for metonymic constructions could also be due to competition between multiple interpretations that are being entertained in parallel whenever a metonymic verb is encountered. Using the visual-world paradigm, we devised an experiment which enabled us to determine the time course of metonymic interpretation in relation to non-metonymic controls. The experiment provided evidence in favor of a non-competitive, serial coercion process.
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