Seven eye-tracking-while-reading experiments were conducted to examine how the processing of complex semantic expressions is modulated by changes to sentence structure. The results show that inanimate subject-verb integration (e.g., The pistol injured the cowboy), metonymy (e.g., The journalist offended the college), and complement coercion (e.g., The secretary began the memo) impose a processing cost on the reader when the critical constituents appear together the same clause. In contrast, processing difficulty is reduced or eliminated completely when there is a distant structural relationship between the constituents that convey the complex meaning (e.g., The pistol that injured the cowboy; The journalist offended the honor of the college; The memo that the secretary began). Two corpus analyses demonstrate that there is not a straightforward relationship between reductions in online processing difficulty due to sentence structure and frequency patterns in samples of naturally occurring language. A theoretical framework is proposed that conceptualizes the processing of a variety of complex semantic expressions as stemming from a similar processing stage reflecting the need to detect and resolve a semantic mismatch, although the precise mechanisms underlying this process likely vary depending on the specific type of semantic expression. Reductions in processing difficulty due to structural separation reflect linguistic deemphasis of a complex semantic relationship and the reader's tendency to process this deemphasized relationship at a shallow or underspecified level.Doctor of Philosoph
