Interactive Processing

Interactive processing is the proponent that argue that syntax and semantics are combined at all levels of processing. Ferreira and Clifton (1986) conducted and experiment and asked the participants to read sentences such as:

1. The women sculpted by the ice sculpture was very attractive to look at.

2. The women that was sculpted by the ice sculpture was very attractive to look at.

3. The picture painted by the artist was very interesting to look at

4. The picture that was painted by the artist was very interesting to look at

Sentences one and three are called reduced relatives because relative pronoun is missing, Ferreira and Clifton argued that people have a natural tendency to encode non verb combinations. Evidence proves that participants took longer to read the article reason being is that they discover the wrong interpretation in the first sentence and have to recover whereas in the second sentence prevents them from making this mistake.

In sentences, three and four participants took the same length of time to read sentence three as sentence one. The same type of experiments of this sort have been used to argue the modularity of language; the argument is that processing of language makes use of something specific to language- namely, syntax and ignores other general knowledge- pictures cannot paint.