Activating event knowledge

摘要

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate thatcomprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and thatincoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any lar-ger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote ortypically play a role in. We used short stimulus onset asynchrony priming to demonstratethat (1) event nouns prime people (sale-shopper) and objects (trip-luggage) commonlyfound at those events; (2) location nouns prime people/animals (hospital-doctor) andobjects (barn-hay) commonly found at those locations; and (3) instrument nouns primethings on which those instruments are commonly used (key-door), but not the types ofpeople who tend to use them (hose-gardener). The priming effects are not due to normativeword association. On our account, facilitation results from event knowledge relatingprimes and targets. This has much in common with computational models like LSA or BEA-GLE in which one word primes another if they frequently occur in similar contexts. LSApredicts priming for all six experiments, whereas BEAGLE correctly predicted that primingshould not occur for the instrument-people relation but should occur for the other five. Weconclude that event-based relations are encoded in semantic memory and computed aspart of word meaning, and have a strong influence on language comprehension.