Lexical expectations in parsing complement-verb sentences

Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes

“…Several studies have indicated that the sentence parser initially attempts to use the "preferred" subcategorization frame for a given verb, with backtracking and reanalysis occurring when the less preferred subcategorization frame turns out to be appropriate (Holmes, Stowe, & Cupples, 1989). Consistent with this view, Osterhout et al (1994) reported that outright violations of verb subcategorization and violations of sub categorization preferences both elicited a P600-like response.…”

Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons

“…We also selected five elicitation-based data sets for comparison: Connine et al (1984), Kennison (1999), Garnsey et al (1997), Trueswell et al (1993), and Holmes, Stowe, and Cupples (1989). The first two were sentence production studies, in which subjects were given a list of verbs and were asked to write sentences for each one.…”

Limitations on the use of verb information during sentence comprehension

“…First, it improves upon the design used in a number of important investigations (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990;Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997;Holmes et al, 1989;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), as these experiments compared reading time on ambiguous and unambiguous S complements, but did not test sentences containing ambiguous NP complements. Second, the present study improves upon a prior investigation that did test the effect of verb information on how readers resolved sentences containing the ambiguous NP and S complements as well as unambiguous S complements (Kennedy et al, 1989).…”

“…Since the early 1980s, researchers have investigated the possibility that verb information can be used to guide the analysis of subsequent words and phrases (Clifton, Frazier, & Connine, 1984;Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982;Holmes, Kennedy, & Murray, 1987;Holmes, Stowe, & Cupples, 1989;Kennedy, Murray, Jennings, & Reid, 1989;Mitchell, 1987Mitchell, , 1989Mitchell & Holmes, 1985;Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1989). The use of verb information during structural ambiguity resolution is central to a number of theories of sentence processing (see MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a, for a review).…”