JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 28,668-689 (1989) Lexical Expectations in Parsing Complement-Verb Sentences

Using the single-word self-paced reading task, three experiments investigated parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. The verbs differed in the likelihood with which they are typically followed by a direct object (NP-bias verbs) or a clausal complement (clausal-bias verbs). When the potential direct object was short, readers were “garden-pathed ” after NP-bias verbs, but not after clausal-bias verbs. The pragmatic plausibility of the potential direct object also only influenced responses in sentences con-taining NP-bias verbs. The results suggest that lexical expectations may determine the initial structural assignment made by the reader in these sentences. It was argued that models of parsing should incorporate a role for lexical expectations at an early stage of syntactic decision-making. 0 1989 Academic Press, Inc. The purpose of the arbitrary symbols that constitute a printed text is to attempt to communicate a message to some actual or potential audience. The meaning of the message is of course crucially dependent on the meanings of the individual words mak-ing up each sentence. It is for this reason that considerable interest has centered on the question of how readers recognize words and gain access to their meanings. However, any general theory of the reading process must also have something to say about how structural relations between words are established during reading. If readers did not appreciate how to group words into phrases and clauses, they would be able to understand only a limited number of exceptionally simple sentences. It is possible that the presence of supra-segmental cues in the acoustic signal assist