Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: evidence from either...or

Abstract

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input.