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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

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Structural priming among prepositional phrases: evidence from eye movements.

Matthew J Traxler¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA. mjtraxler@ucdavis.edu

Memory & Cognition

|May 22, 2008

Summary

This study investigated how readers process prepositional phrases, finding that agent roles are implicitly activated more readily than instrument roles during sentence parsing.

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

The human sentence parser's ability to handle prepositional phrases is crucial for language comprehension.
It remains debated whether prepositional phrases are processed as a uniform category or differentiated subtypes.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if the parser distinguishes between agent and instrument prepositional phrases.
To investigate the role of verb argument structure in resolving syntactic ambiguity.

Main Methods:

Participants read temporarily ambiguous sentences with agent or instrument primes.
Priming effects were measured for subsequent target sentences.

Main Results:

Both agent and instrument primes significantly facilitated agent targets.
Agent primes showed a smaller, nonsignificant effect on instrument targets compared to instrument primes on instrument targets.
This suggests obligatory activation of agent roles but not instrument roles for the tested verbs.

Conclusions:

Verb argument structure influences structural decisions during sentence processing.
Readers implicitly activate agent roles when encountering instrument phrases, but not vice versa.
Persistent or rapidly reactivated structural representations facilitate sentence processing.