Constituent attachment and thematic role assignment in sentence processing: Influences of content-based expectations

https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(88)90011-3Get rights and content

Abstract

The experiments reported here use individual word reading times in a self-paced word-by-word reading task to examine the processing of prepositional phrase constituents in sentences like “The spy saw the cop with a revolver but the cop didn't see him”. In Experiment 1 we show that reading times for words immediately following the prepositional phrase (“with a revolver”) are predictable from the consistency of subjects' expectations for the attachment of such prepositional phrases with the attachment dictated by the content of the prepositional phrase itself. These expectations vary from sentence to sentence with the content of the material preceding the prepositional phrase and do not appear to reflect the syntactic principle of Minimal Attachment. Experiment 1 conflated violations of expectations for prepositional phrase attachment with violation of role and filler expectations; Experiment 2 examined the contribution of each of these three types of expectation violations to the slowing of reading times. Violations of filler expectations that did not change expected role or attachment produced a small but significant slowdown in processing the words just following the prepositional phrase. Violations of thematic role expectations and filler expectations produced a much larger slowdown, but violation of attachment expectations as well as filler and role expectations did not produce any additional slowing of processing. We interpret these results as supporting models of sentence processing in which thematic role expectations for upcoming constituents play a role in guiding the interpretation of these constituents as they are initially processed.

References (37)

  • R. Thibadeau et al.

    A model of the time course and content of reading

    Cognitive Science

    (1982)
  • L. Tyler et al.

    The on-line effects of semantic content on syntactic processing

    Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

    (1977)
  • S. Crain et al.

    On not being led up the garden path: The use of context by the psychological syntax parser

  • M. Daneman et al.

    Individual differences in integrating information between and within sentences

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

    (1983)
  • C. Fillmore

    The case for case

  • C. Fillmore

    Some problems for case grammer

  • Fillmore, C. (in preparation). On grammatical...
  • M. Ford et al.

    A competence-based theory of syntactic closure

  • Cited by (218)

    • Beyond associations: Sensitivity to structure in pre-schoolers’ linguistic predictions

      2016, Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      In this regard, it also differs from the proposal that structural (thematic) knowledge is directly encoded in the lexico-semantic network, which amounts to a blurring of the distinction between semantics and structure (McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997). Our account is compatible with findings that semantics can have immediate effects on the structural analysis of sentences (e.g., Taraban & McClelland, 1988), and can sometimes cause syntactically congruent sentences to be processed as syntactically anomalous (e.g., Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Note that according to a production-based account, predictions must be compatible with the unfolding semantic interpretation of the sentence and will (additionally) be compatible with its unfolding structural interpretation if the comprehender has enough time to compute structural relations.

    • Eye movements in reading and information processing: Keith Rayner's 40 year legacy

      2016, Journal of Memory and Language
      Citation Excerpt :

      Much of the following decades of research on sentence comprehension was directed at testing this model and developing alternatives. One line of criticism was to suggest that the semantic and discourse manipulations in these previous studies were weak, and that more strongly biased materials did indeed eliminate the effects of syntactic difficulty (e.g., Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Taraban & McClelland, 1988; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994). Another was to argue that any effects of syntactic difficulty were attributable to the frequency of the less preferred structures rather than to any inherent structural bias (e.g., MacDonald et al., 1994).

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    This research was supported by ONR Contract N00014-86-K-0349, as well as by Research Scientist Career Development Award MH-00385 to the second author.

    View full text