Abstract
The semantic representation of a sentence may be regarded as a complex concept formed by the repeated integration of a phrase constituent schema into a head schema. We propose a model of sentence comprehension that checks for the consistency between a constituent schema and the requirement for integration into a slot within the head schema. If this requirement is not satisfied, the selectional restriction on the slot is extended to be coherent with the comprehender's world knowledge, and consistency is then checked again. According to this model, reading times for noun phrases and response times in a sentence acceptability task will reflect the number of consistency checks. We compared reading times (Experiment 1) and response times in the sentence acceptability task (Experiments 1 and 2) across sentences with typical noun phrases and sentences with atypical ones that will require more checks. In the two experiments, reading times and response times increased in proportion to the number of checks. These results are consistent with the prediction from the model.
