Lexical expectations in sentence comprehension

Two experiments demonstrated that readers use specific lexical information in comprehending sentences to anticipate and prepare for the appearance of lexical noun phrases and to postulate “gaps” that are associated with “fillers” and provided evidence for the use of pragmatic information.

Abstract

Verbs, as a syntactic category, accept noun phrase complements (direct objects). Some specific verbs require such complements, others prohibit them, while still others differ in the likelihood that they will be used with direct objects. Two experiments demonstrated that readers use specific lexical information in comprehending sentences to anticipate and prepare for the appearance of lexical noun phrases and to postulate "gaps" that are associated with "fillers." One experiment used an on-line secondary task to demonstrate the effects of violating a lexically based syntactic expectation, while a second experiment used an end-of-the-sentence grammaticality judgment task to demonstrate a similar effect on gap filling. The experiments demonstrated that lexically based expectations involve the use of information about appropriate syntactic or thematic categories, and provided evidence for the use of pragmatic information as well. The question of how lexical information interacts with other types of information in sentence processing was raised.