The cost of context repair: Presupposition accomodation

In the present experiment, the processing costs and time-course of presupposition accommodation were studied, as compared to presupposition satisfaction and independently of the presupposition trigger in use. Two main results emerged from the data collected. First, presupposition accommodation requires greater processing costs than satisfaction, reflecting a process of context repair where both a linking and an updating process are needed. Second, presupposition accommodation takes places immediately just as the trigger becomes available and proceeds incrementally during the sentence processing. This result suggests that presuppositions are processed on-line and that, independently of the type of trigger in use, they are accommodated before the asserted content is computed.