TENSE, TEMPORAL CONTEXT AND SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION

During sentence comprehension, events denoted by verbs must be related to other events already established in the discourse. This often requires the tense of a verb to be evaluated in relation to specific temporal properties of the discourse. We investigated the time course of this process by examining whether the usual bias to initially interpret a participial verb in a reduced relative clause as a past-tense verb in a main clause would be reduced or eliminated when the temporal properties of the discourse are inconsistent with a past-tense interpretation. In Experiment 1, the subjects completed fragments such as The student spotted when they appeared in contexts containing events occurring in the future or events occurring in the past. The fragments were typically completed as main clauses (e.g. The student spotted - the proctor.) in the past contexts, and as relative clauses (e.g. The student spotted - by the proctor.) in the future contexts. In Experiments 2 and 3, the subjects read target sentences presented two words at a time using a moving window paradigm. The target sentences began with relative clauses which were presented in past or future contexts. Reduced relative clauses were read faster in the future contexts as compared with the past contexts, indicating that the temporal information in the discourse reduced the garden path normally associated with this structure. The results demonstrate that temporal information from the discourse is accessed rapidly enough to be used in syntactic ambiguity resolution, indicating that the tense of a verb is immediately evaluated in relation to the discourse model. These results are interpreted as support for incrementalist approaches to comprehension in which a discourse model is continuously updated during comprehension and in which sentence processing is sensitive to the resulting constraints. © 1991, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.