The Availability of Verb-based Instrument Information in Sentence Processing

This work explores the role of verb information during online processing of spoken language. Currently, the field already acknowledges a large influence of verb information in the prediction of structure during language comprehension, but focuses on information used to make predictions about immediately upcoming, syntactically licensed constituents, leaving questions about how (and if) verb information is used to make predictions about other upcoming elements of the sentence. Instruments are unique in that they have a close semantic relation with verbs while at the same time, they maintain only a loose syntactic connection. As such, instruments have the potential to untangle questions about what kinds of verb-specific information can influence unfolding interpretation of a sentence. Also, a better understanding of the connection between instruments and their associated verbs can help to shed light on the structure and organization of lexical entries. These findings should prove useful for researchers and students of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, particularly those investigating Lexical Semantics or Sentence Processing.

earned her Ph.D in linguistics and Brain andCognitive Sciences from the University ofRochester. She continues to work on verbs at theUniversity of Wisconsin- Madison by inventing fakeverbs for novel actions, and teaching them tounsuspecting undergraduates.