Participant roles and the processing of verbs during sentence comprehension

This paper explores the nature of thematic information made available when a verb is accessed during sentence comprehension. Following Shapiro, Zurif, and Grimshaw (1987), a cross-modal lexical decision (interference) task was employed to examine whether either the number of argument structures or the number of participant (thematic) roles inherent in a verb cause an increase in processing load upon access of the verb. It was determined that there was no evidence for such an increased processing load covarying with the number of argument structures of the verb, at least for those verb types examined in this study. However, there was an increase in processing load as a direct function of the number of participant roles carried by the verb. It is concluded that the participant roles (thematic roles associated with the central meaning of the verb) are stored with the representation of a verb and are made immediately, available upon access of the verb for further processing during comprehension.The first author gratefully acknowledges discussion and advice from Adele Goldberg and the support of grant T32 DC 00041 in pursuing this work. The second author acknowledges the support of NIH grant RO1 DC00494 for the work presented in this paper, and the helpful comments and criticisms of a reviewer.