The time course of local coherence effects in German: Evidence from self-paced reading times and event-related potentials

In sentences like “The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee,” the string“the player tossed a frisbee” cannot be an active subject-verb-object (SVO)clause given the preceding context; yet, comprehenders seem to entertainthis incorrect parse, at least momentarily. Behaviorally, this momentarymis-parse is expressed as greater difficulty when the SVO chunk is read.This phenomenon, called local coherence effect, has important implicationsfor sentence processing theories that treat grammar as a strict filter duringincremental sentence processing: Under such a strict filter, local coherenceeffects should never occur. Although several studies report the existence oflocal coherence effects, one question remains unanswered: at what momentare local coherence effects triggered, and how quickly – if at all – does grammaroverride the mis-parse? We investigate the time course of local coherenceeffects through two experiments in German (self-paced reading and EEG).Our data suggest that the local coherence effect, indexed by longer readingtimes and a more positive P600, was triggered as soon as the locally coherentchunk was read. However, the locally coherent parse did not linger; it didnot continue to cause processing difficulty. The model that our results aremost compatible with is self-organized parsing. Our results do not supportaccounts in which local coherence effects are caused by uncertainty aboutprevious input or by a breakdown of algorithmic parsing. A broader implicationof our findings is that although grammar is not a strict a-priori filter,it can step in rapidly to correct incremental structure building.