10.1.6: The Interactionist Approach of Parsing

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The interactionist approach ascribes a more central role to semantics in parsing a sentence. In contrast to the syntax-first approach, the interactionist theory claims that syntax is not used first but that semantics and syntax are used simultaneously to parse the sentence and that they work together in clarifying the meaning. There have been several experiments which provide evidence that semantics are taken into account from the very beginning reading a sentence. Most of these experiments are working with the eye-tracking techniques and compare the time needed to read syntactical equal sentences in which critical words cause or prohibit ambiguity by semantics. One of these experiments was done by John Trueswell and coworkers in 1994. He measured the eye movement of persons when reading the following two sentences:

The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable. The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.

He observed that the time needed to read the words “by the lawyer” took longer in case of the first sentence because in the first sentence the semantics first allow an interpretation in which the defendant is the one who examines, while the evidence only can be examined. This experiment shows that the semantics also play a role while reading the sentence which supports the interactionist approach and argues against the theory that semantics are only used after a sentence has been parsed syntactically. [edit] Inferences Creates Coherence

Coherence is the semantic relation of information in different parts of a text to each other. In most cases coherence is achieved by inference; that means that a reader draws information out of a text that is not explicitly stated in this text. For further information the chapter [Neuroscience of Text Comprehension] should be considered.