Does verb structure affect sentence comprehension?

Abstract

Fodor, Garrett, and Bever have reported two experiments suggesting that sentences containing complex verbs are more difficult to comprehend than ones containing simple verbs. However, the tasks they used, paraphrasing and anagram solving, reflect comprehension difficulty only very indirectly. Both of the present experiments compared the difficulty of sentences containing simple and complex verbs using the paraphrasing task and also a task that assesses on-line comprehension difficulty, phoneme monitoring. The paraphrasing task yielded the predicted effect in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. The phoneme monitoring task failed to yield the effect in either experiment. Two alternative accounts were suggested for the present data as well as those of Fodor et al.