Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at the syntax-semantics interface

This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coerc ion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation req uiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes An experiment is described assessing w hether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion-in addition to syntact ic composition-is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically transparent counterpart, a string that provides for an interpretable repres entation via syntactic composition alone. The prediction of a higher comput ational cost for this process is borne our by the results.