Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Understanding sentence comprehension requires examining how readers process different types of knowledge.
• Previous research has explored how world knowledge influences reading, but the role of linguistic constraints is less clear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how readers utilize selectional restrictions versus general world knowledge during sentence comprehension.
• To determine if processing disruptions differ based on the type of impossibility encountered in a sentence.

Main Methods:

• Monitored readers' eye movements while they read sentences categorized as plausible, violating selectional restrictions, or violating world knowledge.
• Analyzed eye movement data on pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words to identify processing disruptions.

Main Results:

• Eye movements showed significant disruption in the selectional restriction violation condition compared to plausible and world knowledge violation conditions.
• Processing disruption was linked to the verb-argument relationship, not solely the degree of event impossibility.

Conclusions:

• The findings indicate that selectional restriction violations cause distinct processing effects compared to world knowledge violations.
• This study provides strong evidence for the dissociation between processing effects of selectional restrictions and general world knowledge in reading.