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Abstract
Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary. In contrast, when repetition of the target word was infelicitous (Experiment 2), readers experienced an immediate repetition cost when repetition occurred within a clause, but this cost was eliminated entirely when repetition occurred across clause boundaries. The results have implications for word recognition during reading, processes of semantic integration, and the role of sentence structure in guiding these linguistic representations.
Keywords Repetition priming · Relative clauses · Eye movements
Introduction
Successful language comprehension relies on mental operations that rapidly access and combine lexical, semantic, and syntactic information. A central goal of psycholinguistics is to understand how these operations are coordinated during sentence processing and the extent to which these different levels of linguistic representation interact with one another in real time. The experiments presented in the current article address this goal by examining how the structure of a sentence might modulate the processing of lexical repetition, given that the repetition of a word in a sentence has the potential to affect processes of both lexical retrieval and semantic interpretation. Thus, an important goal of this work is to understand whether changes to the structure of a sentence modulate processes of word recognition, sentence interpretation, or both.
A large body of literature drawing on a wide variety of approaches has shown that changes to sentence structure can influence the depth at which language is processed (e.g., Baker & Wagner, 1987; Birch & Rayner, 1997, 2010; Bredart & Modolo, 1988; Cutler & Fodor, 1979; Ferreira, 2003; Gordon & Hendrick,...