title: The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all.
abstract: Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. astaub@psych.umass.edu
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Staub
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D005133:Eye Movements; D006801:Humans; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics