Abstract
An eye tracking experiment was conducted in order to investigate the role of verb information in resolving structural ambiguity during sentence comprehension. Reading time was measured on sentences containing temporarily ambiguous noun phrases (e.g., “The athlete revealed the problem⊙) that were continued as tensed sentence (S) complements or noun phrase (NP) complements. Ambiguous noun phrases were preceded either by verbs occurring most frequently with NP complements (NPbiased) or verbs occurring most frequently with S complements (S-biased). Reading time was also measured on sentences containing unambiguous S complements preceded by either NP-biased or S-biased verbs. The results showed that contrary to predictions made by verb guidance theories (e.g., constraint satisfaction; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a, 1994b; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994), for both NP- and S-biased verb conditions, sentences containing temporarily ambiguous noun phrase complements were read most quickly, and sentences containing temporarily ambiguous S complements were read more slowly than those containing unambiguous S complements.
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This research was conducted in partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Massachusetts and financially supported by Grants HD-07327 and HD-18708 awarded to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Grant MH-19554 awarded to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Kennison, S.M. Limitations on the use of verb information during sentence comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8, 132–138 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196149
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196149