Investigating Semantic Competition Between Global Knowledge and Local Context in Real-Time Sentence Processing

Extensive evidence shows that listeners use global knowledge to generate predictions of upcoming sentences themes; however, there is less investigation on how local context that semantically conflicts with long-standing global knowledge is integrated and applied in real-time sentence comprehension. Three studies used the visual world paradigm to study this question. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings that listeners typically rely on global knowledge to anticipate sentence themes. Experiment 2 suggests that adult listeners rapidly increase the weight of combinatorial evidence from local context and decrease the weight of global knowledge to anticipate the appropriate sentence theme. Experiment 3 shows that 5-8 year-old children do not overcome semantic conflict in time to generate predictions of the sentence theme. These results indicate that in the presence of semantic conflict, adult comprehenders rapidly learned to favor local context over global knowledge, but this ability appears to emerge after a child turns 8 years-old.