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Thematic roles in sentence parsing
1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003.
Summary
Eyetracking reveals that readers initially misinterpret sentence structure, treating inanimate subjects as direct objects. Sentence reanalysis occurs later, suggesting inanimacy aids error correction rather than initial parsing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Ergative verbs and their processing present unique challenges in sentence comprehension.
- Previous research suggests inanimate subjects in ergative constructions are initially assigned thematic roles, preventing misanalysis.
- The role of subject animacy in guiding early syntactic parsing remains an area of investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of subject animacy in the syntactic processing of ergative verbs using eyetracking.
- To examine whether readers initially assign postverbal noun phrases as direct objects with inanimate subjects.
- To test the hypothesis that subject inanimacy facilitates the revision of initial parsing errors.
Main Methods:
- Two eyetracking experiments were conducted to record participants' reading patterns.
- Participants read sentences containing ambiguous ergative verbs with inanimate subjects.
- Reading times and fixation patterns were analyzed across different regions of the sentences.
Main Results:
- Reading patterns in the disambiguating region mirrored previous findings, showing no disruption.
- However, eyetracking data from earlier sentence regions indicated initial misanalysis.
- Readers initially treated the postverbal noun phrase as a direct object, even with inanimate subjects.
Conclusions:
- Subject inanimacy does not appear to guide the initial syntactic analysis of ergative sentences.
- Inanimate subjects may instead facilitate the revision of an initial misanalysis.
- This suggests a more dynamic and error-prone sentence comprehension process than previously assumed.