Eyetracking while reading passives: an event structure account of difficulty

TY - JOUR

T1 - Eyetracking while reading passives

T2 - an event structure account of difficulty

AU - Paolazzi, Caterina Laura

AU - Grillo, Nino

AU - Cera, Claudia

AU - Karageorgou, Fani

AU - Bullman, Emily

AU - Chow, Wing Yee

AU - Santi, Andrea

N1 - Funding Information: We would like to acknowledge BA/Leverhulme Small Grants SRG\170108 to Andrea Santi. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2021/7/6

Y1 - 2021/7/6

N2 - Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading experiments, with no modulation of verb type. However, self-paced reading provides limited direct measurement of late revision/interpretive processing. We used modified stimuli from Paolazzi et al. (2019) to re-examine this issue in two eye-tracking while reading experiments. We found that in late measures, passives with subject-experiencer verbs had longer fixation durations than actives at the verb and two subsequent regions but no difference was observed across agent-patient verbs. Subject-experiencer verbs provide a state, but the passive structure requires an event. Thus, the required eventive interpretation is coerced with subject-experiencers (if possible) and induces difficulty.

AB - Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading experiments, with no modulation of verb type. However, self-paced reading provides limited direct measurement of late revision/interpretive processing. We used modified stimuli from Paolazzi et al. (2019) to re-examine this issue in two eye-tracking while reading experiments. We found that in late measures, passives with subject-experiencer verbs had longer fixation durations than actives at the verb and two subsequent regions but no difference was observed across agent-patient verbs. Subject-experiencer verbs provide a state, but the passive structure requires an event. Thus, the required eventive interpretation is coerced with subject-experiencers (if possible) and induces difficulty.

KW - Event structure

KW - eye-tracking

KW - passive sentence

KW - sentence processing

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109856005&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2021.1946108

DO - 10.1080/23273798.2021.1946108

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85109856005

SN - 2327-3798

VL - 37

SP - 135

EP - 153

JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

IS - 2

ER -