integration often will have to wait for results communicated from syntactic integration through the
syntactic–conceptual interface.
Finally, therenormallycomesa pointwhereallthecompetingmultipleanalysesbutoneareextinguished,becauseofill-
formedness, contextual bias, or other factors. At this point the remaining analysis is the one the hearer understands as
“the sentence.”Sometimes this process ofresolution fails and the hearer construes the sentence as ambiguous or
perhaps a pun. On the other hand, sometimes the processor resolves multiple competing possibilities prematurely, as
in“garden path”sentences such as (4).
(4) The horse raced past the barn fell.
(=‘The horse that was raced past the barn fell’).In example (2) (It's only a parent, not a teacher), resolution affectswhat actual lexical ite mis heard as part of the sentence.
That is, thefinal choice of words in the sentence is not complete until resolution has taken place—in this case
following conceptual integration.
7.4.2 Priming
Let us pursue a bit further the logic behind the semantic promiscuity of lexical access. In the experiments that
demonstrate this promiscuity, it is found that, for a brief period, the wordbugheard in any sentential context primes
(speeds up reaction time to) the“lexical decision task”of recognizing eitherinsectorspyas a word; these words are
semantically related to different senses ofbug. After this brief period, only one of these words continues to be primed:
the one related to the sense ofbugin the presented sentence. How can this come about?
Bughas toprimeinsectandspyviathesemanticsoftheitems—thereis nophonologicalresemblance.Theassumptionis
thatpriming amounts toa degreeof“pre-activation”: theprimed lexical iteminsectis already somewhatactive whenthe
probe stimulus is detected, so it takes less time for it to reach the threshold necessary to trigger a response.
In order to trigger a response, the lexical iteminsecthas to be bound to the encoded probe in working memory (or
“selected into workingmemory”). But it can only be bound to the probe via its phonology (or orthography, if visually
presented). In other words, the preactivation of the item's semantics leads also to the preactivation of its phonology,
which in turn leads to quicker binding to the probe. Finally, this binding is picked up by unknown processes (see
remarks insection3.5)thatleadtotheexperimentalresponse,namelypushingthebuttonthatsignals“yes, it'sa word.”
Fig. 7.3 illustrates all the processes involved in leading to the sped-up response