The shape of things to come: The roles of linguistic and perceptual information during online processing

Some researchers have suggested that anticipatory processes in language processing are restricted to "grammatically-legitimate" combinatorial possibilities (e.g., Dahan et al., 2000), while other discuss combinatorial relationships as being influenced by the "real world" compatibility of objects properties (e.g., Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000). The present experiment examines Cantonese Chinese classifiers (grammatical articles that correspond to real-world physical properties of the nouns they classify) to study anticipatory effects when grammatical and perceptual constraints diverge. When asked to make explicit judgments about how well classifiers "fit" with certain objects, participants ignored the objects' shape properties and made ratings based on linguistic rules. During an online sentence processing task, however, participants showed sensitivity to both linguistic and perceptually-based combinatorial constraints. Results from this study indicate that online sentence processing incorporates both linguistic and perceptual information, and reveals that perceptual and semantic information can drive anticipatory processes even when grammatical information provides incompatible cues.