Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play?

Abstract

To elucidate how different kinds of knowledge are used during comprehension, readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences that were: plausible, impossible because of a selectional restriction violation, or impossible because of a violation of general world knowledge. Eye movements on the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words evidenced disruption in the selectional restriction violation condition compared to the other two conditions. These findings suggest that disruption associated with reading about impossible events is not directly determined by how impossible the event seems. Rather, the relationship between the verb and arguments in the sentence seems to matter. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that processing effects associated with selectional restrictions can dissociate from those associated with general world knowledge about events.

World knowledge affects prediction as quickly as selectional restrictions: evidence from the visual world paradigm

“…Given the current findings, and compelling logical arguments about the impossibility of partitioning lexical and non-lexical meaning (Clark, 1983; Jackendoff, 2002), one likely possibility is that selectional restrictions are a specialized form of world knowledge (Matsuki et al, 2011; Warren et al, 2015). However, they must be something more than knowledge of an individual event, because violating selectional restrictions leads to different patterns of disruption than violating simple event knowledge (Warren & McConnell, 2007; Warren et al, 2015). One possibility, suggested by Warren et al (2015), is that selectional restrictions are verb-related abstractions across world knowledge (see Resnik (1996) for a computational model that implements a very similar idea).…”

“…However, they must be something more than knowledge of an individual event, because violating selectional restrictions leads to different patterns of disruption than violating simple event knowledge (Warren & McConnell, 2007; Warren et al, 2015). One possibility, suggested by Warren et al (2015), is that selectional restrictions are verb-related abstractions across world knowledge (see Resnik (1996) for a computational model that implements a very similar idea). To account for patterns of ERP effects, Paczynski and Kuperberg (2012) and Kuperberg (2013) proposed that comprehenders generate and use event abstractions at both coarse-grained levels, like Agent <animate>; Action; Patient <inanimate>, and fine-grained levels, like Experiencer <people>; State <awe>; Stimulus <view>; Place <peak of mountain>.…”

“…In a 2007 study, Warren and McConnell minimized differences in the likelihood of the events described by selectional restriction violations and world knowledge violations, and found that readers' eye movements still showed earlier and greater disruption to the selectional restriction violations than to the world knowledge violations. More recently, Warren, Milburn, Patson, and Dickey (2015) tested items in which the events described by the world knowledge violations and selectional restriction violations were similarly impossible, and found early disruption for only the selectional restriction violations. These findings are the clearest evidence so far that selectional restrictions may be processed earlier than world knowledge.…”

The influence of event-related knowledge on verb-argument processing in aphasia

“…However, there is growing evidence that there may be important processing differences between verb knowledge and world knowledge, even though they are not processed by separate modules and verb knowledge might develop from abstractions across world knowledge (see Warren, Milburn, Patson & Dickey, under review). In the current paper, we use verb knowledge to refer to knowledge of a verb’s core semantic and combinatorial requirements – for example, that drink entails both an agent and a theme (a person who drinks and an object being drunk) and requires that its object be liquid.…”

Looking for a Location: Dissociated Effects of Event-Related Plausibility and Verb–Argument Information on Predictive Processing in Aphasia

“…Likelihood (on the basis of event-based world knowledge) and verb-argument status may be dissociated. It is possible for implausible or unlikely event participants to satisfy a verb's argument-structure requirements (Rayner, Warren, Juhasz, & Liversedge, 2004;Warren, Milburn, Patson, & Dickey, 2015), and likely event participants need not be lexically specified as part of a verb's argument structure (e.g., a likely event location, such as at the rink in The child ice skated at the rink).…”