The Cost of Enriched Composition: Eye-Movement Evidence from German

Reading research in English has shown that the processing of logical metonymy as in “The student began the book” is costly compared with, e.g., “The student read the book” (McElree et al., 2001; Traxler, Pickering, & McElree, 2002). An explanation for this is that the interpretation of “began the book” requires type shifting of the object noun (“book”) into an event representation (e.g. “began reading the book”), a mechanism also known as enriched composition (cf. Pustejovsky, 1995). The present experiments were designed to answer two important questions: