Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha)

Abstract

Language processing is rapidly incremental, but evidence bearing upon this assumption comes from very few languages. In this paper we report on a study of incremental processing in Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Australian language, which expresses complex sentence-level meanings in a single verb, the full meaning of which is not clear until the final morph. Forty native Murrinhpatha speakers participated in a visual world eyetracking experiment in which they viewed two complex scenes as they heard a verb describing one of the scenes. The scenes were selected so that the verb describing the target scene had either no overlap with a possible description of the competitor image, or overlapped f..