The Contributions of Verb Bias and Plausibility to the Comprehension of Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences

Abstract

Eyetracking and the self-paced moving-window reading paradigm were used in two experiments examining the contributions of both frequency-based verb biases and the plausibility of particular word combinations to the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The temporary ambiguity concerned whether a noun following a verb was its direct object (The senator regretted the decision immediately.), or instead the subject of an embedded clause (The senator regretted the decision had been made public.). The experiments crossed the plausibility of the temporarily ambiguous noun as a direct object (e.g.,The senator regretted the decision .vsThe senator regretted the reporter .) with verb bias, eliminating a confound present in earlier research and allowing an examination of interactions between the two factors. Unbiased verbs were included as well to evaluate the role of plausibility in the absence of verb bias. The results generally replicated Trueswell, Tanenhaus, and Kello's (1993) finding that verb bias has rapid effects on ambiguity resolution, and showed in addition that verb bias and plausibility interact during comprehension. The results are most consistent with parallel interactive models of language comprehension such as constraint satisfaction models.