Illusions of plausibility in adjuncts and co-ordination

Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186 and Sturt, P. (2023) Illusions of plausibility in adjuncts and co-ordination. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38 (9). pp. 1318-1337. ISSN 2327-3801 doi: 10.1080/23273798.2023.2235033

Abstract/Summary

Illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are misperceived as grammatical (e.g. The key to the cabinets were rusty), have been widely studied during language comprehension. Such grammatical illusions have been influential in debate surrounding so-called representational and retrieval-based accounts of linguistic dependency resolution. Whether analogous illusions of plausibility occur at the level of semantic interpretation has only recently begun to be examined, and thus far, these illusions have been restricted to a narrow range of linguistic phenomena. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments (n = 48 in each) and two self-paced reading experiments (n = 192 in each) we examined the possibility of semantic illusions during the processing of adjuncts and co-ordination. Across experiments, our results suggest illusions of plausibility during dependency resolution, though interference effects were clearer in adjuncts than co-ordination. We argue that our findings are more compatible with retrieval-based rather than representational accounts of linguistic dependency resolution.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/112690
Identification Number/DOI	10.1080/23273798.2023.2235033
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences
Publisher	Taylor & Francis
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