Inter-sentential Influences on Predicted Verb Subcategorization

This study investigated the influences of prior
discourse context and cumulative syntactic priming
on readers predictions for verb subcategorizations.
An additional aim was to determine whether
cumulative syntactic priming has the same degree of
influence following coherent discourse contexts as
when following series of unrelated sentences.
Participants read temporarily ambiguous sentences
that resolved to sentential complement. The
sentences either followed a discourse context or a
series of scrambled sentences. In addition, the
number of sentences that resolved to a sentential
complement in the preceding sentence set was also
varied. Reading times across the disambiguating and
postdisambiguating regions were recorded. No
significant main effects or interactions were found
for either region. However, follow-up analyses,
using per phoneme reading times and nonparametric
statistics resulted in a significant main effect of
coherence for some comparisons.

Autorentext

Jill L. Brady received her Ph.D. in Communication Science and Disorders from the University of Pittsburgh in December 2008. She is currently an assistant professor in the Speech Pathology and Audiology program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Klappentext

This study investigated the influences of prior discourse context and cumulative syntactic priming on readers' predictions for verb subcategorizations. An additional aim was to determine whether cumulative syntactic priming has the same degree of influence following coherent discourse contexts as when following series of unrelated sentences. Participants read temporarily ambiguous sentences that resolved to sentential complement. The sentences either followed a discourse context or a series of scrambled sentences. In addition, the number of sentences that resolved to a sentential complement in the preceding sentence set was also varied. Reading times across the disambiguating and postdisambiguating regions were recorded. No significant main effects or interactions were found for either region. However, follow-up analyses, using per phoneme reading times and nonparametric statistics resulted in a significant main effect of coherence for some comparisons.