Contextual override of pragmatic anomalies: Evidence from eye movements

Readers typically experience processing difficulty when they encounter a word that is anomalous within the local context, such as ‘The mouse picked up the dynamite…’. The research reported here demonstrates that by placing a sentence in a fictional scenario that is already well known to the reader (e.g., a Tom and Jerry cartoon, as a context for the example sentence above), the difficulty usually associated with these pragmatic anomalies can be immediately eliminated, as reflected in participants’ eye movement behaviour. This finding suggests that readers can rapidly integrate information from their common ground, specifically, their cultural knowledge, whilst interpreting incoming text, and provides further evidence that incoming words are immediately integrated within the global discourse.