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Abstract:
Many studies have focused on the issue which role verbs play
in sentence comprehension (Abney (1989); Clifton, Speer, Abney
(1991); Shapiro, Nagel, Levine (1993)). It has been claimed that
for an initial parse either structural preference principles or
lexically determined factors drive the attachment of material
following the verb. More precisely, following a structurally driven
hypotheses as in Frazier (1987) parsing an NP requires the
application of a general attachment rule. By contrast, lexically
oriented approaches propose that there is the need to access the
argument information in a lexical entry of the verb. We addressed
this question in presenting sentences containing two verb classes:
intransitive/transitive (see example 1) and purely intransitive
verbs (example 2) to participants while recording their EEG
(electroencephalogram). In most experiments argument or adjunct
reading preferences have been tested in the form of prepositional
phrases or noun plus prepositional phrase constructions. By
contrast, our study used simple NPs in form of argument or temporal
adverbial phrases.
Note the following examples:
1a) intransitive/transitive-particle verb with argument NP:
Er lächelte den Arbeiter an...
He smiled the worker at...
(He smiled at the worker...)
1b) intransitive/transitive-particle verb with adverbial NP:
Er lächelte den Moment lang...
He smiled the moment long...
2a) intransitive verb with argument NP:
*Er zögerte den Bauherrn an...
*He hesitated the constructor at...
2b) intransitive verb with adverbial NP:
Er zögerte den Moment lang...
He hesitated the moment long...
The results we found show a tendency that adjunct NPs are more
easy to integrate in a sentence structure than argument NPs. This
can be seen when comparing the N400 components for both types of
NP: the adverbial NP has a smaller N400 than the argument NP.
Interestingly, this is true for both types of verb. Therefore we
conclude that attachment of any NP takes place on the basis of a
general rule application and does not depend on the previous access
of specific verb information.
Abney, St. P. (1989): A computational model of Human Parsing.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18 (1), p. 129-144
Clifton, C.; Speer, Sh.; Abney, St. P. (1991): Parsing Arguments:
Phrase Structure and Argument Structure as Determinants of Initial
Parsing Decisions. Journal of Memory and Language, 30,p. 251-271
Frazier; L. (1987): Theories of Sentence Processing. ch. 15; in: J.
L. Garfield, Modularity in Knowledge Represenation and
Natural-Language Understanding. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Shapiro, L. P.; Nagel, H. N.; Levine, B. A. (1993): Preferences for
a Verb`s Complements and their Use in Sentence Processing. Journal
of Memory and Language, 32, p. 96-114
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