Current linguistic theories assume a rich lexicon, in which individual lexical entries are associated with syntactic subcategorization information and semantic argument structures. Verbs in particular are associated with sets of thematic roles that indicate the types of sentential context in which they may appear. Five experiments explore the ways that thematic relations and syntactic phrase structure contribute to the parsing process in human language comprehension. Two on-line tasks, phoneme monitoring and self-paced reading, are used to measure sentence processing during the comprehension of NP-V-NP-PP sentences.; The first experiment provides empirical evidence from a sentence completion task to confirm linguistic intuitions about the thematic roles likely to be associated with the arguments of agentive transitive verbs. S-V-O contexts tested in the first experiment are extended to create materials for the subsequent experiments. Experiments two and three show processing effects due to syntactic complexity (verb-attached vs. verbal object-attached prepositional phrases) and due to the thematic role preferences of the verbs. These effects replicate across the auditory and visual modalities. Experiments four and five examine the contributions of preposition (IN and WITH), verb type, verb-preposition pairing, and preposition-thematic-relation pairing on the parsing process for sentences of the same syntactic structure (verb-attached prepositional phrases). Results indicate that verb type and preposition-thematic relation pairing influence on-line decisions of the human language parser.
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