Understanding the Influence of Local Coherence on the Reanalysis Process of Temporally Ambiguous Noun Phrase: The Role of Animacy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this study, we conducted a self-paced reading experiment to explore how a locally coherent structure formed by an animate temporally ambiguous noun phrase (DP) and its subsequent verb guides the reanalysis of the ambiguous DP. In the sentence “While the police was investigating the detective examined by the lawyer an officer opened the door,” the DP “the detective” following the ambitransitive verb “investigate” is temporally ambiguous in its syntactic position: it can be the direct object (DO) of “investigate” or the matrix subject (MS) of the main clause. This temporary syntactic ambiguity can be resolved upon encountering the DP “an officer,” which allows only the DO analysis of “the detective.” Following previous studies (cf. Phillips 1995), the DO analysis of “the detective” is initially preferred. This is compatible with the later appearing DP “an officer,” which should be the MS of the main clause. However, processing difficulty was observed when the DP “an officer” was encountered. This suggests that readers performed the MS reanalysis of the DP “the detective” before encountering the disambiguating DP “an officer.” In comparison, no processing difficulty was observed when the temporally ambiguous DP was inanimate (“the evidence”). This suggests that animacy plays a role in forming the local coherence (cf. Tabor et al. 2004) that leads to the reanalysis of the temporally DO/MS ambiguous DP.