The effect of lexical, pragmatic, and morphological violations on reading time and deviance ratings of English and German sentences

Abstract

Effects on reading time and deviance ratings of word-choice violations were studied at the surface code, propositional textbase, and situation model levels of representation in German and English sentences. Lexical violations (propositional textbase level) such as The housewife massaged the bread dough were rated as more deviant from normal language than were pragmatic violations (situation model level) such as The police officer shot the parking violator, although the pragmatic violations took longer to comprehend. The addition of a morphological (surface code) violation through the wrong form of an article (e.g., a ugly car) decreased reading time but only in cases where that material was deeply processed and where the morphology carried substantial syntactic information (e.g., in German, the definite article carries case, gender, and number information). The results thus confirmed the operation of comprehension strategies at multiple levels of representation and identified some cross-linguistic generality in comprehension and some language differences.