Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents an eyetracking during reading experimentthat investigated the role of supportive context on processingaspectual coercion. Coercion sentences in need of aspectualenrichment were embedded in discourse contexts providingthe necessary information for successful interpretation. Thefindings of the reported experiment show that context infor-mation can be used immediately without disrupting reading ofcoercion sentences. The lack of coercion costs in supportivediscourse contexts provides experimental evidence for the pro-posed Composition in Context Hypothesis and against theoriesthat view semantic composition as largely encapsulated fromcontext. Furthermore, the present experiment investigated therole of inter-individual differences in verbal working memorycapacity on the immediate use of contextual information incomputing coerced interpretations.