Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: Immediate effects of verb-based thematic constraints
The authors used 2 “visual-world” eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch
constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun
phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the
referent’s name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb
condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the
input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the
neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto
meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based
competitor set.
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