Sentence processing and discourse context

Abstract

The time course of the subprocesses of sentence comprehension is investigated, in order to determine if the processor is strictly syntactic in its initial analysis or if it already accesses information of semantic and discursive nature in time to influence the syntactic analysis. Two experimental studies are reviewed with speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, to assess the effects of discursive context in processing. The first revisits ambiguous Prepositional Phrases and finds effect of the previous context only in the final measures, which monitor the interpretation. The second uses the eye-tracking technique to gauge the antecedent search for the subject of clauses with a verb in the inflected infinitive, finding effect of the previous discourse both in the off-line and in the online measures. Possible reasons for the differences between the discourse effects in the two experiments are discussed.