Verb effects during sentence processing

Abstract

We describe a study that explores how the properties of a verb's lexical entry contribute to on-line sentence processing. Schmauder (1991) has recently suggested that the verb-processing effects shown previously by Shapiro and his colleagues (Shapiro & Levine, 1990; Shapiro, Zurif, & Grimshaw, 1987; 1989) are not generalizable and may have been artifacts precipitated by experimental design factors. In this paper we logically analyze such a possibility and then present experiments that systematically investigate the design differences between the Shapiro et al. studies cited above and the Schmauder study. These analyses and experiments provide further evidence that verb effects during sentence processing are real, are to be expected given the architectures of recent parsing models, and are replicable using a dual task that is modified in reasonable ways.