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When are implicit agents Encoded? Evidence from cross-modal naming
1Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, 14260, USA.
Brain and Language
|August 6, 1999
Summary
Readers immediately access implicit agents when recognizing passive verbs, aiding sentence comprehension. This study highlights how semantic information is used during language processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Readers integrate semantic argument information to understand verb roles in sentences.
- Previous studies indicate implicit agents are understood in passive sentences (e.g., "The door was shut") but not intransitive ones (e.g., "The door shut").
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the timing of semantic argument information access during verb integration.
- To determine when readers utilize implicit agent information for sentence representation.
Main Methods:
- A cross-modal naming task was employed to measure reaction times.
- Participants processed sentences and performed a secondary naming task.
Main Results:
- Implicit agents are accessed immediately upon recognition of a passive verb.
- Cross-modal naming is sensitive to certain types of lexically encoded semantic information.
Conclusions:
- Semantic argument information, specifically implicit agents, is accessed very early in sentence processing for passive constructions.
- The findings support theories of immediate and automatic semantic integration during language comprehension.