Graded Effects of Verb Subcategory Preferences on Parsing: Support for Constraint-satisfaction Models

Abstract

This study examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can have an influence on parsing, and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. We measured naming latencies for transitive and complement clause continuations of sentences which contained verbs which subcategorise for these two structures. Naming latency was taken to be an on-line indication of parsing difficulty. Faster latencies were found when the sentence continuation accorded with a verb's preferred subcategory structure, than when it accorded with its non-preferred structure. This suggests that verb subcategory preferences do influence the parse. The stronger the preference of the verb for one subcategory structure over the other, the larger the advantage in naming latency found for the preferred over the non-preferred continuation. This suggests that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. The findings support the predictions of constraint-satisfaction models of parsing.