Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A sentence such as ”We finished the paper” is indeterminate regarding what we finished doing with the paper. Thesesentences constitute a test case for two major issues regarding the nature of language comprehension: (1) whether ornot semantic composition is simple (classical) or enriched with intended or implicit constituents; and (2) the nature ofthe linguistic and cognitive resources that help us interpret the event the sentence conveys. We conducted an eye-trackingstudy to investigate whether indeterminate sentences embedded within biasing contexts would trigger event interpretations,using a long-term memory paradigm. In each trial, participants were presented with one of three recognition probe typesfor reading while having their eyes monitored. Recognition probes were presented 0 seconds (s) after having read theindeterminate sentence, or following an additional 25s of neutral discourse. Results suggest that abductive processes,relying on the propositional content of supporting context, drive indeterminate sentence interpretation.