LEXICAL GUIDANCE IN SENTENCE PROCESSING

An eyetracking experiment was conducted to explore a self-paced readin g effect reported by Mitchell (1987). Mitchell found that a noun phras e (NP) was read slowly when it immediately followed an intransitive ve rb, as long as the verb and NP appeared in the same presentation regio n. This effect has been used to support the claim that verb subcategor ization information is not used initially in sentence parsing. However , the effect did not appear in the eyetracking experiment reported in the present paper, supporting criticisms that Mitchell's segmentation procedure distorted the parsing process.