A atuação de conhecimentos de eventos na compreensão da leitura

Abstract

This study aims at investigating if fine-grained knowledge of real word events is activated during sentence reading in reduced context. In the Linguistics literature, knowledge about real world events is frequently not considered part of the linguistic system, being treated as general conceptual representations. This research follows the reading comprehension model proposed by Kuperberg (2013), to which there is not a strict division between lexicalized semantic knowledge and world knowledge. In this perspective, these information are stored in the long-term memory as event knowledge. This knowledge has different levels of specificity, being formed not only by coarse-grained conceptual features (e.g selection restrictions, probabilistic information) but also by fine-grained knowledge about the structure of real world events (e.g roles that are typically occupied by certain entities) (JACKENDOFF, 2002). The interaction between contextual representation and fine-grained knowledge about events can facilitate the comprehension of words related to the structure of the activated event. However, little is known about the contextual strength that is necessary for this interaction to happen. To understand if simpler contextual representations are able to interact with more structured knowledge about events, we carried out an eye-tracker experiment. Using sentences such as the waitress thoughtlessly wrote down the couples order, we analyzed if the context formed by the arrangement between an external argument that is the name of a specific being (e.g waitress) and a verb (e.g write down) is able to access fine-grained knowledge about events and facilitate semantic features of participants that are more likely to occupy the internal argument position (e.g order). The results indicate that the contexts created by the arrangements between external arguments and verbs are not able to alter the fixation times in the internal argument region. Moreover, the results also reveal that total reading times and fixations counts are lower in the predictable internal arguments, regardless the arrangements. This effect is related to the verb preference. The results suggest that coarse-grained event knowledge become evident when the contextual representation is reduced.