It’s about time! Time as a parameter for lexical and syntactic processing: an eye-tracking-while-listening investigation

We examined the time-course of lexical activation, deactivation, and the syntactic operation of dependency linking during the online processing of object-relative sentence constructions using eye-tracking-while-listening. We explored how manipulating temporal aspects of the language input affects the tight lexical and syntactic temporal constraints found in sentence processing. The three temporal manipulations were (1) increasing the duration of the direct object noun, (2) adding the disfluency <i>uh</i> after the noun, and (3) replacing the disfluency with a silent pause. The findings from this experiment revealed that the disfluent and silence temporal manipulations enhanced the processing of subject and object noun phrases by modulating activation and deactivation. The manipulations also changed the time-course of dependency linking (increased reactivation of the direct object). The modulated activation dynamics of these lexical items are thought to play a role in mitigating interference and suggest that deactivation plays a beneficial role in complex sentence processing.