Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While most formal semantic accounts of focus-sensitive particles such as ‘only’ acknowledge that their interpretationrequires the integration of contextual information with the linguistic representation, it is less clear how this interaction playsout in real-time. Recent psycholinguistic work in this domain favors an incremental processing story, but divergent resultselsewhere complicate this picture. Our findings from two Visual World eye-tracking studies (n = 33, 32) help resolve thisconflict, and confirm the existence of an adult processing asymmetry: sentences in which ‘only’ associates with the subject(’Only John bought an apple’) take longer to process than object-only sentences (’John only bought an apple’). We find thatcurrent accounts of the representation and exhaustification of propositional alternatives invoked by ’only’ do not explain thiseffect. We suggest that differences at the event-structural level — which propositional alternatives arguably map onto — mightexplain the asymmetry.