Mj. Traxler et al., INFLUENCE OF CONNECTIVES ON LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION - EYE-TRACKING EVIDENCE FOR INCREMENTAL INTERPRETATION, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 50(3), 1997, pp. 481-497
An eye-tracking experiment investigated whether incremental interpreta
tion applies to interclausal relationships. According to Millis and Ju
st's (1994) delayed-integration hypothesis, interclausal relationships
are not computed until the end of the second clause, because the proc
essor needs to have two full propositions before integration can occur
. We investigated the processing of causal and diagnostic sentences (S
weetser, 1990; Tversky & Kahneman, 1982) that contained the connective
because. Previous research (Traxler, Sanford, Aked, & Moxey, 1997) ha
s demonstrated that readers have greater difficulty processing diagnos
tic sentences than causal sentences. Our results indicated that diffic
ulty processing diagnostic sentences occurred well before the end of t
he second clause. Thus comprehenders appear to compute interclausal re
lationships incrementally.