Abstract
An eyetracking experiment was conducted to explore a self-paced reading effect reported by Mitchell (1987). Mitchell found that a noun phrase (NP) was read slowly when it immediately followed an intransitive verb, as long as the verb and NP appeared in the same presentation region. This effect has been used to support the claim that verb subcategorization information is not used initially in sentence parsing. However, the effect did not appear in the eyetracking experiment reported in the present paper, supporting criticisms that Mitchell’s segmentation procedure distorted the parsing process.
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The present research was supported by Research Grant HD 18708 and Training Grant MH 16745 to the University of Massachusetts. The research was begun while D.C.M. was visiting the University of Massachusetts as a Senior Fulbright Scholar with the support of grants from the Nuffield Foundation and the ESRC (R-0023-1596). The authors would like to thank Martin Corley, Lyn Frazier, and Shelia Kennison for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Adams, B.C., Clifton, C. & Mitchell, D.C. Lexical guidance in sentence processing?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5, 265–270 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212949
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212949