The role of event knowledge in the processing of single sentences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2017.2.26408Keywords:
Event knowledge, Language comprehension, Sentence processing, Self-paced reading.Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the role of event knowledge in language processing. Empirical research in psycholinguistics argue that event knowledge is part of a set of pragmatic cues that can impact language comprehension. However, a self-paced reading experiment presented here has found no evidence of this effect, indicating that event knowledge, if accessed by readers, did not have any influence in the processing of single sentences that create a highly predictive context. Because this result contradicts previous findings, we argue that (a) the nature of the effects reported by previous experiments needs to be examined; (b) the way experimental items are presented may lead to the adoption of different processing strategies, which could explain the contradiction captured by our experiment; (c) paradigms such as self-paced reading may not be adequate to register the same effects captured by other techniques. Although the second hypothesis may be more suitable to account for our data, we state that it could only be validated by future research on this topic.
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