Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb’s complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai et al., 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online and the timecourse of context effects remain unclear, but in our view it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e., descriptions of the utterance context used to infer the salient reading of the utterance. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in a self-paced reading study to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline task, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time.

中文翻译：

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普通话体动词加工中语境效应的自定进度阅读研究


过去几年的研究调查了带有体动词的表达的语义复杂性，然后是表示实体的补语，例如完成这本书，这会导致跨语言的处理成本。结构化个体假设（SIH）提出，体动词在词汇上编码一个其值（维度）必须被解析的函数。假设这种歧义消解发生在动词的补语上，其中根据上下文选择特定的维度（Piñango & Deo，2016）。鉴于上下文在 SIH 中的关键作用，最近的研究（Lai et al., 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019）在离线句子可接受性判断研究中调查了带有体动词的句子的解释如何受到有偏见的上下文的影响以及在线眼动追踪研究。然而，这两项研究的结果表明，有偏见的语境消除了离线时体动词表达的解释的歧义，而有偏见的语境中的处理成本并未发现实时降低成本。离线与在线发现相互冲突的结果以及上下文效应的时间进程的原因仍不清楚，但在我们看来，这可能是由于语用上下文，即用于推断话语显着阅读的话语上下文的描述。我们在一项自定进度的阅读研究中使用语法上下文（两类副词）来检查普通话中带有体动词的句子的上下文效果。我们发现，有偏见的语法上下文不仅影响离线任务中的解释，而且还极大地促进了在线实验中的处理。我们得出的结论是，有偏见的语法上下文立即实时预先决定了体动词表达的解释。