On the real-time character of interpretation during reading

Abstract The immediacy of interpretation of anaphoric expressions occurring in written discourse was examined in two experiments, using a technique for measuring the time to detect misspellings on subsequent words in the sentence. The critical contrast was between spelling error detection latency for verbs which were either consistent with a full contextual interpretation of the prior anaphor or inconsistent. In the first experiment a substantial consistency effect was observed for verbs which immediately followed either an anaphoric proper name or definite description. This result indicates that the full contextual interpretation of the anaphors occurs as soon as they are encountered. In the second experiment anaphoric pronouns were used which could refer to either the main character in the story or a subsidiary character. Consistency effects were only observed for verbs which immediately followed the main character pronouns. This result indicates that unambiguous pronouns may not be given a full context...

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