Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fodor (1983) has claimed that informational encapsulation of the parser is the way the language system prevents extralinguistic factors firom slowing down first pass processing. However, in a naming task where the visual probe was an appropriate or inappropriate pronoun continuation to a gerundive phrase following passages in which discourse focus and verb semantics were co-varied (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler & Koster, 1993) we found appropriateness effects which suggest a role for on-line pragmatic inference in top down control of the parser. Fodor, Garret & Swinney (1993) maintain that, though the gerund is marked as requiring a subject NP, the inferential activity underlying referent assignment does not occur until an explicit anaphor (the pronoun target) is encountered. As modularity predicts a cost associated with contacting real world information, assignment times to gerunds should take longer than assignments based on lexical information. A speeded fragment completion task was used to counter Fodor's objection to a pronoun probe and to detect differences in the times taken to make anaphor assignments. The two studies reported here used the original Marslen-Wilson et al. (1993) materials. Conect assignments in the gerundive condition ("Rurming towards...") were cost free with the exception of the condition where the pragmatically most likely subject was not in discourse focus. Latencies to initiate a completion were otherwise similar regardless of whether the to-be-completed fragment contained a gerund or a disambiguating pronoun. Furthermore, in the absence of pragmatic constraints, assignment always favoured the highlighted entity. These results reproduce the critical data from the Marslen-Wilson et al. (1993) study which demonstrates context effects on first pass processing.