This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first-language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants (N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of the grammatical morphemes used to indicate time reference in these clauses. Specifically, the processing cost for high attachment was larger when time in the lower clause was indicated by the auxiliary verb will compared to when it was indicated by the relatively less salient past -ed morpheme. These findings were taken to indicate that the influence of perceptual salience extends beyond the acquisition of and sensitivity to grammatical morphemes during L1 and L2 development. Rather, the perceptual salience of these forms also appears to affect online structural processing during adult L1 sentence comprehension.

本研究调查了语法语素的感知显着性是否影响成人第一语言（L1）理解过程中暂时模棱两可的句子的在线处理。在双向自定进度阅读任务中，成人 L1 英语参与者 ( N = 44) 阅读带有时间附加语的句子，这些句子的结构位置可以附加到最近的动词短语 (VP) 或附加到某个 VP 上。更高的条款。与之前的发现一致，这些句子的阅读时间表明，当该附加物仅允许高度依恋时，处理困难。至关重要的是，这种效果是通过用于指示这些子句中时间参考的语法语素的感知显着性来调节的。具体来说，当低位从句中的时间由助动词 will 表示时，与由相对不那么显着的过去式词素表示时相比，高依恋的处理成本更大。这些发现表明，感知显着性的影响超出了 L1 和 L2 发展过程中语法语素的习得和敏感性。相反，这些形式的感知显着性似乎也影响成人母语句子理解过程中的在线结构处理。