Effects of world knowledge on the prediction of upcoming verbs: an eye-tracking study

Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences (i.e., world knowledge). According to such theories, the former meaning is privileged over the latter in terms of the time-course of its access and influence during on-line language comprehension. The present study aims to examine whether world knowledge anomalies (that do not violate selectional restrictions) are rapidly detected during online sentence processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific verb (entrevistar or secuestrar, the Spanish translations for to interview and to kidnap) depended on the agent of the event (periodista or terrorista, the Spanish translations for journalist and terrorist). The results showed an effect of typicality in regression path duration and total reading times at both the verb region and the spillover region, thus providing evidence that world knowledge is rapidly accessed and used during on-line sentence comprehension.