On the temporal course of gap-filling during comprehension of verbal passives

The work presented in this paper examines the time course of antecedent reactivation following movement gaps found in passive sentences. Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique, (re) activation of the subject noun phrase (NP) was examined at various critical points following the verb (near the posited gap) for verbal passive sentences and for active (control) sentences. Subjects made lexical decisions to visual targets that were presented at three locations during auditory sentence comprehension: immediately after the matrix verb, 500 msec after the verb, or 1000 msec after the verb. Responses to targets related to the subject NP were faster than those to controls during passive sentences (gap sentences), but not during active sentences (no-gap sentences), thus indicating that reactivation of the matrix subject did occur in the passive cases. Furthermore, the magnitude of the priming increased with distance and time from the verb, going from a nonsignificant trend at the verb to a highly significant effect at 1000 msec following the verb. These results are discussed in terms of both formal and processing models of language.The authors wish to thank Janet Nicol for her contributions to the materials and design of this experiment. This work was supported in part by NIDCD Grant DC01947 and by a University of Washington grant to the first author and an AFOSR grant (AFOSR 91-0225) to the second author.