What Are You Tinking About Where? Syntactic Ambiguity between Abstract Arguments and Concrete Adjuncts in Hungarian, Modulated by Concreteness

What Are You Tinking About Where? Syntactic Ambiguity between Abstract Arguments and Concrete Adjuncts in Hungarian, Modulated by Concreteness

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Background.Te critical importance of lexical concreteness and embodied sensorimotor processes for language comprehension is ofen assumed to be beyond doubt.Hungarian grammar is unique in that it expresses certain verb arguments using spatial sufxes, which sometimes create ambiguity between literal spatial adjuncts and abstract verb arguments.Objective.

In the present study, our goal was to investigate the role and m perhaps primacy of concrete spatial meaning when generating iphone 14 price arizona the abstract sense of arguments of mental verbs.Design.Towards that end, we embedded ambiguous verb-noun constructs with both a possible locative adjunct reading (i.e.

spatial, literal) and a verb argument reading (i.e.abstract, fgurative), with a continuously varying preference for one or the other, in disambiguating sentence contexts.Using a selfpaced reading paradigm, we measured reading times of verbs and sentence fnal nouns of the ambiguous constructs.

Results.We found no diference in the reaction times to verbs, which suggests that their argument frames were obligatorily activated regardless of sentential context.Nouns were read more slowly in the argument contexts, yet the slower pace was driven by constructs that had a preferred locative reading.Conclusion.

Tis pattern of results contradicts strong embodiment explanations, and can be better accounted for by dual coding theory.Our fndings demonstrate the importance of studying the role of concreteness and metaphoricity in linguistic meaning construction in the context of syntax and 6-0 igora vibrance sentence processing.