A sentence such as We finished the paper is indeterminate with regards to what we finished doing with the paper. Indeterminate sentences constitute a test case for two major issues regarding language comprehension: (1) how we compose sentence meaning; and (2) what is retained in memory about what we read in context over time. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read short stories that were unexpectedly followed by one of three recognition probes: (a) an indeterminate sentence (Lisa began the book), that is identical to the one in the story; (b) an enriched but false probe (Lisa began reading the book); and (c) a contextually unrelated probe (Lisa began writing the book). The probes were presented either at the offset of the original indeterminate sentence in context or following additional neutral discourse. We measured accuracy, probe recognition time, and reading times of the probe sentences. Results showed that, at the immediate time point, participants correctly accepted the identical probes with high accuracy and short recognition times, but that this effect reversed to chance-level accuracy and significantly longer recognition times at the delayed time point. We also found that participants falsely accept the enriched probe at both time points 50% of the time. There were no reading-time differences between identical and enriched probes, suggesting that enrichment might not be an early, mandatory process for indeterminate sentences. Overall, results suggest that while context produces an enriched proposition, an unenriched proposition true to the indeterminate sentence also lingers in memory.
Keywords: compositionality; discourse context; eye-tracking; false memory; indeterminate sentence comprehension; pragmatics; propositions; semantic coercion.
Copyright © 2021 Antal and de Almeida.