Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of these experiments suggest that there is little or no delay in pragmatic processing relative to syntactic processing in the comprehension of unambiguous sentences. This narrows the possible explanations for any delays that are observed in the use of pragmatic information for ambiguity resolution.