Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths

Abstract

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was...") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentence-complement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models.