Abstract
Several experiments in Psycholinguistics found evidences of Iterative Coercion, an effect related to the reanalysis of punctual events used in durative contexts triggering an iterative meaning. We argue that this effect is not related to aspectual features, and that event-duration semantics is accessed during Sentence Processing. We ran a self-paced reading experiment in Brazilian Portuguese whose sentences contain events with an average duration of a few minutes. These sentences were inserted in durative contexts that became the experiment’s conditions following a Latin Square design: control condition (minutes), subtractive (seconds), iterative (hours) and habitual (days). Higher RTs were measured at the critical segments of all experimental conditions, except for the habitual context. The results corroborated our hypothesis while defying the psychological reality of habitual coercion. To better observe the habitual coercion condition, we now present a reanalysis of Sampaio et al. (2014) data. The present analysis confirms the results of our tests.***Semântica da duração de eventos no processamento online de sentenças***Diversos experimentos psicolinguísticos encontraram evidências da CoerçãoIterativa, um efeito relacionado à reanálise de eventos pontuais usados emcontextos durativos, que resultam numa leitura iterativa. Nesse trabalho argumentamos que esse efeito não é relacionado a propriedades aspectuais e que a semântica da duração dos eventos é acessada online. Aplicamos um experimento de leitura auto-monitorada em Português Brasileiro, cujas sentenças contém eventos com duração média de alguns minutos. Estas sentenças foram inseridas em quatro condições durativas, seguindo uma distribuição fatorial (quadrado latino):condição controle (minutos), subtrativa (segundos), iterativa (horas) e habitual (dias). Nossos resultados indicam maiores RTs nos segmentos críticos das condições experimentais, exceto em relação a condição habitual. Esses resultados confirmam nossa hipótese, porém, põem em cheque a realidade psicológica da coerção habitual. Assim, para melhor observar os efeitos dessa condição, procedemos uma reanálise dos dados de Sampaio et al. (2014), que finalmente veio confirmar o resultado de nosso teste.
Highlights
Much before the glamorous Hollywood release of Dennis Villeneuve’s ‘The Arrival’ (2017) tried to establish a link between language and time, several works have been produced by linguists and psychologists aiming at identifying time properties in the cognitive domain of language (REICHEMBACH, 1947; ALFORD 1981; HORNSTEIN, 1993; MANI et al 2005; COLL-FLORIT; GENNARI, 2011; SAMPAIO, 2015; 2016; FABER; GENNARI, 2015; GAUTHIER; VAN WASSENHOVE, 2016, 2017; BYLUND; ATHANASOPOULOS, 2017)
It is important to notice that the visual analysis presents a similar increase in the average reading times at the critical segments for the habitual coercion condition as the ones observed for iterative and subtractive coercion
In the earlier test to which we presented a reanalysis we had not controlled the duration of the events in a pretest
Summary
Much before the glamorous Hollywood release of Dennis Villeneuve’s ‘The Arrival’ (2017) tried to establish a link between language and time, several works have been produced by linguists and psychologists aiming at identifying time properties in the cognitive domain of language (REICHEMBACH, 1947; ALFORD 1981; HORNSTEIN, 1993; MANI et al 2005; COLL-FLORIT; GENNARI, 2011; SAMPAIO, 2015; 2016; FABER; GENNARI, 2015; GAUTHIER; VAN WASSENHOVE, 2016, 2017; BYLUND; ATHANASOPOULOS, 2017). This paper aims at testing the hypothesis that the semantics of time affects online sentence processing, based on studies of the so-called aspectual coercion effect (SAMPAIO; FRANÇA; MAIA, 2014; SAMPAIO, 2015). It is a covert mechanism of linguistic system that allows us to understand the difference between two durative sentences having the same structure but different verbal aspects.
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