THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF VERB BIAS AND PLAUSIBILITY TO THE COMPREHENSION OF TEMPORARILY AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES

Eyetracking and the self-paced moving-window reading paradigm were use d in two experiments examining the contributions of both frequency-bas ed verb biases and the plausibility of particular word combinations to the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The temporary a mbiguity concerned whether a noun following a verb was its direct obje ct (The senator regretted the decision immediately.), or instead the s ubject of an embedded clause (The senator regretted the decision had b een made public.). The experiments crossed the plausibility of the tem porarily ambiguous noun as a direct object (e.g., The senator regrette d the decision ... vs The senator regretted the reporter ...) with ver b bias, eliminating a confound present in earlier research and allowin g an examination of interactions between the two factors. Unbiased ver bs were included as well to evaluate the role of plausibility in the a bsence of verb bias. The results generally replicated Trueswell, Tanen haus, and Kello's (1993) finding that verb bias has rapid effects on a mbiguity resolution, and showed in addition that verb bias and plausib ility interact during comprehension. The results are most consistent w ith parallel interactive models of language comprehension such as cons traint satisfaction models. (C) 1997 Academic Press.