THE ROLE OF VERB ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN SENTENCE PROCESSING - DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC EFFECTS

This paper describes an ongoing research program designed to investiga te how syntactic and semantic aspects of lexical information become av ailable to the sentence processing system. The two experiments describ ed here distinguished between syntactic and semantic representations b y using cross-modal naming and lexical decision in a new way. The rela tionship between the main verb and the probe word was varied such that the probe word met either the syntactic criteria to be an argument, t he semantic criteria, neither, or both the syntactic and semantic crit eria. Lexical decision times were sensitive to both syntactic and sema ntic congruity, while naming times were sensitive only to syntactic co ngruity. The two tasks were then used to investigate syntactic and sem antic representations when verb argument structure was ambiguous. Subc ategorized structures were constructed without regard for biasing cont ext, but the contextually inappropriate thematic frame was ruled out w hile the inappropriate syntactic frame was still available.