“What type of apples did you buy?
They are cooking apples.
What are those people doing in the kitchen?
They are cooking apples.
This example may seem unusual, but many, if not most, sentences have more than one grammatically correct interpretation. A classic example is “Time flies like an arrow.” Most people interpret it metaphorically—time moves quickly, as an arrow does. But it could also mean that a particular type or insect (time flies) feel affection for arrows. Or “time” could be a command, with the sentence meaning I want you to assess the pace of those flies, and I want you to do it in the way you would assess the pace of an arrow. There are actually at least two other grammatically acceptable interpretations of this sentence.
Grammatically acceptable, but not acceptable to common sense. There’s not a variety of flies called “time flies.” And who would tell someone to get out their stopwatch and time some flies in the same way they would time an arrow? Who times files or arrows? Just as in the “eating apples” example, readers bring knowledge to bear on the sentence, not just grammar, to arrive at the correct interpretation. But in those examples, the knowledge is not provided in the text. The reader had to know it before reading the text.
The influence of meaning on the processing of a sentence is most obvious when grammar renders the sentences ambiguous, but meaning also has an impact on the speed and ease of processing even if the grammar is ambiguous. For example, the sentence “I cut up a slice of cooked ham” will be read more slowly when it is preceded by a few sentences describing the protagonist getting dressed, compared to a context where the protagonist was described as in a kitchen. That slowing can be avoided by adding one word at the start of the sentence: “Later, I cut up a slice of cooked ham.” So clearly, we’re not just extracting meaning from sentences, we are coordinating the meaning of sentences with the meaning of what we’ve read before, and we’re doing that as we process each sentence.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
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