ABSTRACT
The goal of much psycholinguistic research is to understand the processes by which linguistic input is mapped onto a hearers mental representation of his or her world. Within the context of a sentence such as “The mouse chased the cat into the basket ” we can ask questions such as “At what stage is the cat interpreted as the thing being chased?” “At what stage do we determine which cat?” and, more generally, “How, and when, do we map the components of a sentence onto components of the world?” Historically, there has been somewhat of a shift in respect of the answer to these questions. In the 1960s, “click-detection” studies suggested the possibility that interpretation may be bounded by clausal structure, with clause boundaries being the site of significant processing effort (see Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, 1974, for review); in the 1980s, researchers proposed that interpretation does not “lag” behind syntactic parsing, but takes place incrementally, as each word is encountered (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Crain & Steedman, 1985; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977); and more recently, it has been demonstrated that interpretation can on occasion be driven by expectations made on the basis of linguistic input that precedes the actual linguistic items that confirm those expectations (Altmann, 1999; Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Trueswell, 1989). In this chapter; we review a number of these latter studies. Specifically, we explore the timing of interpretive processes in relation to the mapping of language onto a concurrent visual world.
