Referential semantic anomalies elicit global but not local effects in a self-paced reading task in Spanish

Sentence comprehension requires identifying the meanings associated with specific words, but also the referential content of the sentence as determined by grammar. We aimed to address the contribution of grammar to referential meaning by constructing semantic anomalies where word meanings were correct but referential meaning was anomalous due to the grammatical structure involved: e.g., I visited a London this morning. Using a self-paced reading task, we targeted how these anomalies affected reading time increases, and the location of this effect in the sentences. Seventy native speakers of Spanish read a total of 640 sentences and judged them as either correct or anomalous. Anomalous sentences could be: (ii) Semantic anomalies due to lexical but not grammatical factors (e.g., I arrived in a button), (iii) Semantic anomalies due to grammatical but not lexical factors, or (iv) formal-syntactic anomalies (gender and number agreement mismatches). Responses and response times of these judgements and a confidence rating were collected. We hypothesized that if referential meaning is calculated at the grammatical level, the location of reading time increases would differ between the two semantic anomaly types. We predicted that lexical-semantic anomalies (ii) would cause local reading time increases, whereas grammatical-semantic anomalies (iii) would cause more global effects. In line with our prediction, grammatical-semantic anomalies showed global effects, while lexical-semantic and syntactic anomalies showed local effects. Moreover, lexical-semantic and syntactic anomalies led to shorter reaction times in grammaticality judgments. In this way, semantic anomalies that are neither lexically driven nor syntactically illicit, provide a distinctive index of grammatical meaning: meaning that is referential and integrated at, and through, the grammatical level.