The authors investigated the time course of the processing of metonymic expressions in comparison with literal ones in 2 eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 considered the processing of sentences containing place-for-institution metonymies such as the convent in That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent; it was found that such expressions were of similar difficulty to sentences containing literal interpretations of the same expressions. In contrast, expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation caused immediate difficulty. Experiment 2 found similar results for place-for-event metonymies such as A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam, except that the difficulty with expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation was somewhat delayed. The authors argue that these findings are incompatible with models of figurative language processing in which either the literal sense is accessed first or the figurative sense is accessed first. Instead, they support an account in which both senses can be accessed immediately, perhaps through a single under-specified representation.

In 2 eye-movement experiments, the authors tested whether transitional probability (the statistical likelihood that a word precedes or follows another word) affects reading times and whether this occurs independently from contextual predictability effects. Experiment 1 showed early effects of predictability, replicating S. A. McDonald and R. C. Shillcock's (2003a) finding that words with a high transitional probability (defeat following accept) are read faster than words with a low transitional probability (losses following accept). However, further analyses suggested that the transitional probability effect was likely due to differences in predictability rather than transitional probability. Experiment 2, using a better controlled set of items, again showed an effect of predictability, but no effect of transitional probability. The authors conclude that effects of transitional probability are part of regular predictability effects. Their data also show that predictability effects are detectable very early in the eye-movement record and between contexts that are weakly constraining.

It is commonly assumed that when we encounter a word in a text, we automatically and immediately activate specific, detailed semantic information associated with that word and instantly integrate this information in the unfolding interpretation of the text. On‐line evidence of how we process polysemous words, that is, words with multiple semantically related interpretations or senses, suggests that instead of accessing a specific sense, language users initially activate a word's meaning that is semantically underspecified. Context can then help to make this meaning more specific, if there is a need for it. I will present an overview of the available evidence for this view, including new work that indicates that the type of task can influence how quickly we home‐in on a specific sense, address evidence that, at first sight, seems to contradict the underspecification view, and outline a number of issues that require further attention.

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early stages of resolving meaning ambiguities but only during integration for sense ambiguities. Effects of preference were delayed for both types of verbs. The results contrast with findings concerning the processing of nouns (e.g., K. Rayner & S. A. Duffy, 1986). For meaning ambiguities, the authors argue that delays in resolution allow both meanings to reach a high level of activation, thus reducing effects of frequency. For sense ambiguities, the authors argue that the processor does not access multiple senses but activates one underspecified meaning and uses context to home in on the appropriate sense.

Experiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e. matched on the length and frequency of the constituents and the frequency of the word as a whole). Two sets of the opaque words were partially opaque: either the first constituent was not related to the meaning of the compound (opaque-transparent) or the second constituent was not related to the meaning of the compound (transparent-opaque). In the third set (opaque-opaque), neither constituent was related to the meaning of the compound. For all three sets, there was no significant difference between the opaque and the transparent words on any eye-movement measure. This replicates an earlier finding with Finnish compound words (Pollatsek & Hyönä, 2005) and indicates that, although there is now abundant evidence that the component constituents play a role in the encoding of compound words, the meaning of the compound word is not constructed from the parts, at least for compound words for which a lexical entry exists. Experiment 2 used the same compounds but with a space between the constituents. This presentation resulted in a transparency effect, indicating that when an assembly route is 'forced', transparency does play a role.

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Word count main text: 7,464 2 Abstract Two eye movement while reading experiments address the issue of how reading of an unpredictable word is influenced by the presence of a more predictable alternative. The experiments replicate the robust effects of predictability on the probability of skipping and on early and late reading time measures. However, in both experiments, an unpredictable but plausible word was read no more slowly when another word was highly predictable (i.e. in a constraining context) than when no word was highly predictable (i.e. in a neutral context). In fact, an unpredictable word that was semantically related to the predictable alternative demonstrated facilitation in the constraining context, in relatively late eye movement measures.These results, which are consistent with Luke and Christianson's (2016) corpus study, provide the first evidence from a controlled experimental design for the absence of a prediction error cost, and for facilitation of an unpredictable but semantically related word, during normal reading. The findings support a model of lexical predictability effects in which there is broad preactivation of potential continuations, rather than discrete predictions of specific lexical items.Importantly, pre-activation of likely continuations does not result in processing difficulty when some other word is actually encountered.Keywords: eye movements, reading, predictability, prediction cost 3 When reading or listening, it is sometimes possible to anticipate which word will appear next in a sentence, and it is very clear that the predictability of a word has consequences for processing during incremental comprehension. Eye movement studies have shown that a predictable word, as measured by the word's cloze probability (i.e. the proportion of participants in an off-line production task who complete a sentence fragment using the word; Taylor, 1953), receives shorter eye fixations during reading than does an unpredictable word (e.g. Balota, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1985;Rayner & Well, 1996; Zola, 1984) and is less likely to be fixated at all, i.e. the word skipping rate is higher (e.g., Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl, & Rayner, 1996;Rayner & Well, 1996). Staub (2015) reviews this literature. Evidence that predictability can facilitate processing also comes from electrophysiological data. The N400 is a negative peak in Event Related Potential (ERP) recordings that occurs approximately 400 ms after the onset of a word during either visual or auditory presentation of sentences. The amplitude of this response is increased when a word provides a poor semantic fit in its context (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980, 1983, but also when a word is relatively unexpected, as measured by cloze probability (Federmeier & Kutas, 1999; Federmeier, Wlotko, De Ochoa-Dewald, & Kutas, 2007;Kutas & Hillyard, 1984).The main focus of the present study is on the processing of a word that is relatively unexpected in its context. We use eyetracking during reading to address two questions regarding processing of an unexpected word...

An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g., the book) appears as the complement of an event-selecting verb (e.g., began the book). Previous studies demonstrated that these expressions are more costly to process than are control expressions that can be processed with basic compositional operations (L. Pylkkanen & B. McElree, 2006). Complement coercion is thought to be costly because comprehenders need to construct an event sense of the complement to satisfy the semantic restrictions of the verb (e.g., began writing the book). The reported experiment tests the alternative hypotheses that the cost arises from the need to select 1 interpretation from several or from competition between alternative interpretations. Expressions with weakly constrained interpretations (no dominant interpretation and several alternative interpretations) were not more costly to process than expressions with a strongly constrained interpretation (1 dominant interpretation and few alternative interpretations). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the cost reflects the on-line construction of an event sense for the complement.