Paolazzi, C;
Grillo, N;
Cera, C;
Karageorgou, F;
Bullman, E;
Chow, WY;
Santi, A;
(2022)
Eye-tracking while reading passives: An event structure account of difficulty.
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
10.1080/23273798.2021.1946108.
(In press).
Preview |
Text
Santi_23273798.2021.pdf - Published Version Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading experiments, with no modulation of verb type. However, self-paced reading provides limited direct measurement of late revision/interpretive processing. We used modified stimuli from Paolazzi et al. (2019) to re-examine this issue in two eye-tracking while reading experiments. We found that in late measures, passives with subject-experiencer verbs had longer fixation durations than actives at the verb and two subsequent regions but no difference was observed across agent-patient verbs. Subject-experiencer verbs provide a state, but the passive structure requires an event. Thus, the required eventive interpretation is coerced with subject-experiencers (if possible) and induces difficulty.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Eye-tracking while reading passives: An event structure account of difficulty |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/23273798.2021.1946108 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1946108 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Keywords: | Event structure, sentence processing, eye-tracking, passive sentence |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10129847 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
