Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:10:50.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Is Now-or-Never language processing good enough?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2016

Fernanda Ferreira
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA [email protected]://psychology.ucdavis.edu/people/fferreir
Kiel Christianson
Affiliation:
College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820. [email protected]://epl.beckman.illinois.edu/

Abstract

Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) Now-or-Never bottleneck framework is similar to the Good-Enough Language Processing model (Ferreira et al. 2002), particularly in its emphasis on sparse representations. We discuss areas of overlap and review experimental findings that reinforce some of C&C's arguments, including evidence for underspecification and for parsing in “chunks.” In contrast to Good-Enough, however, Now-or-Never does not appear to capture misinterpretations or task effects, both of which are important aspects of comprehension performance.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. F. & Ferreira, F. (2001) Thematic-roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology 42:368407.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Christianson, K. & Luke, S. G. (2011) Context strengthens initial misinterpretations of text. Scientific Studies of Reading 15:136–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christianson, K., Williams, C. C., Zacks, R. T. & Ferreira, F. (2006) Misinterpretations of garden-path sentences by older and younger adults. Discourse Processes 42:205–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F. (2003) The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology 47(2):164203.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. & Ferraro, V. (2002) Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11(1):1115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F. & Swets, B. (2002) How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. Journal of Memory and Language 46(1):5784.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, L. & Rayner, K. (1982) Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology 14(2):178–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lim, J.-H. & Christianson, K. (2015) L2 Sensitivity to agreement errors: Evidence from eye movements during comprehension and translation. Applied Psycholinguistics 36:1283–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patson, N. D., Darowski, E. S., Moon, N. & Ferreira, F. (2009) Lingering misinterpretations in garden-path sentences: Evidence from a paraphrasing task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35:280–85.Google ScholarPubMed
Payne, B. R., Grison, S., Gao, X., Christianson, K., Morrow, D. G. & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2014) Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: Evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities. Cognition 130:157–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slattery, T. J., Sturt, P., Christianson, K., Yoshida, M. & Ferreira, F. (2013) Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from flawed semantic processing. Journal of Memory and Language 69:104–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, L. K. & Warren, P. (1987) Local and global structure in spoken language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 26(6):638–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Gompel, R. P. G., Pickering, M. J., Pearson, J. & Jacob, G. (2006) The activation of inappropriate analyses in garden-path sentences: Evidence from structural priming. Journal of Memory and Language 55:335–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar