TAKING ON SEMANTIC COMMITMENTS - PROCESSING MULTIPLE MEANINGS VS MULTIPLE SENSES

When does the human language processor take on semantic commitments? This question has two parts: (1) for what class of semantic decisions will the processor make a decision rather than leaving the developing interpretation vague or unspecified?; and (2) at what point during sentence analysis will a decision be made if insufficient information is available to guarantee an accurate decision? Neither question has been answered (or even posed in a fully explicit general form) in the psycholinguistic literature. We recorded readers' eye movements in a study designed to explore these questions. The data indicated that delaying the presentation of disambiguating information until after the occurrence of an ambiguous target lengthened fixation times for words with multiple meanings (the concrete vs. abstract meaning of ball, ring), but not for words with multiple senses (the concrete vs. abstract sense of library, poem). This finding is taken as initial support for the view that semantic commitments are minimized, occurring only when mutually incompatible choices are presented by the grammar or when forced by the need to maintain consistency between the interpretation of the current phrase and any already processed contextual material. However, decisions forced by either of these circumstances occur immediately with associated effects appearing in the eye movement record long before the end of the sentence. © 1990.