STEP: Evidence for the immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing [35126]

This article applies to:
E-Prime 3.0
E-Prime 1.0

 
Detail
Experiment Author: Susan Campbell. Adapted from STEP and used with permission of Brian MacWhinney
 
Experiment Description
This experiment investigates how people decide to which noun in a sentence the verb refers. For instance, in the sentence "John persuaded Mary to wash," Mary is washing, whereas in the sentence "John promised Mary to wash," John is washing. The experiment uses a paradigm where words accumulate on the screen one at a time to investigate where in a sentence disambiguation occurs.

 

Participants are supposed to read the sentence as quickly as possible, and press a button when (or if) it stops making sense (because the noun in the position the verb indicates is not appropriate for the verb: "the cowboy persuaded the horse to surrender").

 
Experiment Instructions
In this experiment, participnts are read sentences that either do or don't make sense. Press any key to begin each trial. To progress through a sentence press the space bar to reveal the next word.  Press Enter to stop if the sentence becomes nonsensical. Pressing Enter will start the next trial. This experiment has 26 trials.

 
Experiment Citation
Boland, J.E., Tanenhaus, M.K., and Garnsey, S.M. (1990). Evidence for the immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 413-432.

Cited Experiment Abstract
When a verb is followed by an infinitival complement, the particular verb determines whether its subject or object is the understood subject of the infinitive. Thus, the verb “controls” the interpretation of the infinitive (e.g. John promised/persuaded Mary to wash). Frazier and colleagues have argued that verb control information is not immediately accessed and used in sentence processing based on whole-sentence comprehension times. The studies reported here examined the use of verb control using an on-line plausibility monitoring task. Subjects immediately detected incongruities that depended upon their having correctly used control information, indicating that verb control information is rapidly accessed and used. It is argued that the results support an approach to language comprehension that emphasizes the importance of lexical representations in rapidly integrating many of the different sources of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge that need to be coordinated during language comprehension.

Works Cited by the Experiment

Boland, J.E., Tanenhaus, M.K., Carlson, G., & Garnsey, S.M. (in press). Lexical projection and the interaction of syntax and semantics in parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

 

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Garnsey, S.M., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Chapman, R.M. (1989). Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 51-60.

 

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Stowe, L.A., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Carlson, G.N. (1989). Filling gaps on-line: Use of lexical and semantic information in sentence processing. Manuscript submitted for publication.

 

Tanenhaus, M.K., Boland, J.E., Garnsey, S.M., & Carlson, G.N. (1989). Lexical structure in parsing long-distance dependencies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 37-50.

 

Tanenhaus, M.K., & Carlson, G.N. (1989). Lexical structure and language comprehension. In W.D. Marslen-Wilson (Ed.), Lexical representation and process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

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Tanenhaus, M.K., Carlson, G.N., & Trueswell, J.C. (1989). The role of thematic structures in interpretation and parsing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 211-234.

 

Tanenhaus, M.K., Garnsey, S.M., & Boland, J.E. (in press). Combinatory lexical information and language comprehension. In G. Altman (Ed.), Cognitive models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

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See Also:

STEP: In Search of Gender Neutrality [35122]

STEP: The Interaction of Lexical and Syntactic Ambiguity [35129]