The role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participants

Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230

www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l

The role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participantsq

Kathy Conklin,a,* Jean-Pierre Koenig,a and Gail Maunerb

a Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1030, USAb Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1030, USA

Accepted 3 December 2003

Available online 23 January 2004

Abstract

In addition to information about phonology, morphology and syntax, lexical entries contain semantic information about par-

ticipants (e.g., Agent). However, the traditional criteria for determining how much participant information is lexically encoded have

proved unreliable. We have proposed two semantic criteria (obligatoriness and selectivity) that jointly identify the participants that

are lexically encoded in verbs. We tested whether one of these criteria, semantic selectivity, makes psychologically real distinctions

between participant information that is lexically encoded and participant information that is not. We examined how readers in-

tegrated syntactically optional WH-constituents in filler-gap sentences when the participant information conveyed by the WH-filler

was specific to a restricted class of verbs (i.e., source locations) and when it was not (i.e., event locations). Our results provide support

for the role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participant information of syntactically optional constituents.

� 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Argument structure; Argument; Adjunct; Verb; Filler-gap sentences; Semantics; Source location; Event location; Lexical encoding;

Sentence processing

1. Introduction

In order to understand a sentence a reader must de-

cide what event is described by the sentence, what en-

tities are participating in the event, and what role each

of the participants plays in the event. Many researchers

believe that some participant roles are lexically encoded

in the mental representations of verbs while others are

not. However determining which participant roles are

lexically encoded and the factors that affect their en-coding has proved to be problematic.

qThis research was supported by research Grant No. 1 R01

MH60133-01 from the National Institute for Mental Health, National

Institutes of Health. We gratefully acknowledge Amanda Haimson

and Eugene Lubliner for their work on the Source verb corpora project

and data collection, Yuki Sugiyama and Sunfa Kim for their assistance

in tabulating the location PP co-occurence data, and Craig Colder for

statistical advice. The stimulus materials for this study are available

from the authors.* Corresponding author. Fax: +716-645-3825.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Conklin),

[email protected] (J.-P. Koenig), [email protected]

(G. Mauner).

0093-934X/$ - see front matter � 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00435-8

In this paper, we focus on two factors that we argue

influence the lexical encoding of participant informationin the mental representation of verbs. We suggest that

the two semantic criteria, semantic obligatoriness and

selectivity, jointly identify which participants are lexi-

cally encoded in the Representation of verbs. In previ-

ous work, we have demonstrated that semantic

obligatoriness plays an important role in identifying

which participants are lexically encoded (Koenig,

Mauner, & Bienvenue, 2002a; Koenig, Mauner, & Bi-envenue, 2003). In the current work, we focus on whe-

ther a participant role must be specific to a verb or a

restricted class of verbs in order to be lexically encoded.

Traditionally, linguists believe that some participants,

for example Agents and Patients, are lexically encoded

while others are not. This is illustrated in (1), where the

participants associated with the NPs play particular

roles. Sentence (1a) describes a chasing event, in whichthe verb chase introduces two participants, an Agent,

dog, who does the chasing, and a Patient, cat, who gets

chased. These two participant roles appear to be nec-

essary to any chasing event. This is demonstrated by

mail to: [email protected]

222 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230

the ungrammaticality of (1c) and (1d), in which theconstituents expressing the Agent or Patient roles are

omitted, as indicated by the asterisk (*). Now consider

the example sentence in (2), which is identical to the

sentence in (1a) with the exception of the presence of the

temporal adverbial phrase yesterday, which corresponds

to a Time role. Note that when this Time participant is

omitted, no ungrammaticality results. Participants that

are syntactically required have traditionally been cate-gorized as arguments. Many participants, like the Time

role expressed by yesterday, which are not syntactically

required, have been categorized as adjuncts. Crucially,

syntactically required participants, or arguments, are

thought to be encoded in the lexical-semantic represen-

tations of verbs. Thus both an Agent and Patient are

lexically encoded as arguments of the verb chase. In

contrast the Time role is not syntactically required andhas traditionally been identified as an adjunct.

(1) a. The dog chased the cat.

b. chase <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ dog,

Y¼Patient¼ cat.

c. *The dog chased.

d. *Chased the cat.

(2) The dog chased the cat (yesterday).

The distinction between what is lexically encoded andwhat is not, or what is an argument and what is an ad-

junct, has played an important role in the language sci-

ences. For example, in current linguistic frameworks the

projection of sentences is argued to reflect the argument

structures of verbs or sets of lexically encoded partici-

pants (e.g., Bresnan, 1982; Chomsky, 1981; Foley & Van

Valin, 1984; Pollard & Sag, 1987). This means that ar-

gument information that is included in the representationof lexical entries for verbs like chase drives the construc-

tion of clauses and in some theories of sentence processing

may in part drive sentence processing phenomena. Thus,

the syntactically required occurrence of the subject NP

dog and the direct objectNP cat in (1), and their respective

Agent and Patient roles, are assumed to stem from the

syntactic and/or semantic information associatedwith the

lexical representation of chase. More generally, thismeans that the syntactic structure of many sentences is

determined by information about participants included in

the lexical representation of verbs.

In the sentence processing literature, the distinction

between argument and adjunct has also been important.

The resolution of attachment ambiguities has been

found to be sensitive to the argument adjunct distinction

(Sch€utze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998; Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995). Additionally, lexically en-

coded argument information is predicted to be part of

our understanding of sentences even when it is not

syntactically expressed (Mauner & Koenig, 2000; Mau-

ner, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1995). The literature on the

processing of filler-gap sentences, which is pertinent to

the current study, has demonstrated that lexically en-

coded information is interpreted prior to encounteringsyntactic evidence for a gap (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, &

Garnsey, 1990; Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carl-

son, 1995). More recently, it has been demonstrated that

the processing of filler-gap sentences is also sensitive to

the distinction between arguments and adjuncts (Koenig

et al., 2003).

Despite the importance of the argument–adjunct

distinction to syntactic frameworks and on-line parsingand interpretation, there remains substantial uncertainty

about how to determine which constituents in a sentence

correspond to lexically encoded participants. Linguists

have developed some syntactic tests for determining

whether participants are lexically encoded in the mental

representations of a verb. However, many of the pro-

posed syntactic criteria for determining which partici-

pants of a verb are lexically encoded have proved to beproblematic (for a more complete discussion of syntactic

criteria see discussion in Koenig, Mauner, & Bienvenue,

2002b; Miller, 1997; Sch€utze, 1995; Vater, 1978).Because we are interested in comparing the process-

ing of different classes of syntactically optional constit-

uents in sentences whose verbs do not differ in their

syntactic subcategorization frames, syntactic criteria of

argumenthood are less relevant. We, therefore, take adifferent tack. We define lexically encoded information

as information that is highly activated upon recognition

of a verb and we rely on a purely semantic approach to

determine which syntactically optional constituents

correspond to lexically encoded participant role infor-

mation. We reserve the terms arguments and adjuncts to

cover this semantic distinction between participant role

information that is activated together with the situationdescribed by a verb and participant role information

which is not, respectively (see Koenig et al., 2002b, 2003,

for more details on the possible differences between our

semantic definition of argumenthood and more syntactic

definitions of arguments and adjuncts).

The usefulness of semantic criteria for determining

which participants are lexically encoded in the repre-

sentation of a verb is illustrated by the sentences in (3).In the sentence in (3a), the verb eat introduces an Agent,

Joe, who does the eating, and a Patient, pizza, that gets

eaten. However, the Patient of this sentence can be

omitted without making the sentence ungrammatical, as

illustrated in example (3b). Even though the Patient is

omitted in (3b), it still seems to be part of our under-

standing of the sentence. There is no eating event if

nothing is consumed. This suggests that a Patient par-ticipant is indeed required of an eating event. Evidence

for this possibility is provided by the sentence in (3c),

which is semantically anomalous, as indicated by the

hash mark (#). The second clause of sentence (3c),

which denies that something was eaten, results in a

contradiction, a standard test for semantic obligatori-

ness. Thus while the NP expressing the Patient role in

K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230 223

(3b) is syntactically optional and suggests that eat doesnot require a Patient, the results of the contradiction test

suggest that eat requires a Patient participant, which by

hypothesis is lexically encoded.

(3) a. Joe ate pizza. eat <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ Joe,

Y¼Patient¼ pizza

b. Joe ate. eat <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ Joe,

Y¼Patient¼ ?

c. #Joe ate, but he didn�t eat anything.The example in (3) demonstrates the usefulness of

semantic criteria in determining which participants are

candidates for lexical encoding. We have recently pro-

posed two semantic criteria which appear to affect the

lexical encoding of participant information, semantic

obligatoriness and semantic selectivity (Koenig et al.,

2002a, 2003).1 The first criterion, semantic obligatori-

ness, stipulates that if a participant role is required bythe class of situations described by a verb or verb sense,

then the information relevant to this participant is ac-

tivated upon recognition of this verb. In other words,

for a participant role to be encoded as an argument in

the lexical entry for a particular verb or verb sense, it

must be true of all situations that are described by that

verb sense. The semantic obligatoriness criterion can be

illustrated by comparing the example sentences in (4a)and (4b) to the one in (4c).

(4) a. The incompetent employee was reprimanded in

the office.

b. The incompetent employee was dismissed from

the office.

c. The incompetent employee gave the document to

his boss for John.

Consider first the status of the optional constituentsin the office and from the office in sentences (4a) and (4b).

In the office in (4a) expresses an Event Location (place in

which all participants in the event described by the verb

are located) and from the office in (4b) expresses a

Source Location (the point of origin for the event de-

scribed by the verb). Event Locations pass the obliga-

toriness criterion because there are no situations

described by the sense of reprimand expressed in (4a)that do not require an Event Location participant role.

Thus, Event Locations are candidates for lexical en-

coding, and by extension, for argument status. Similarly

in the sentence in (4b), the Source Location from the

office, is a candidate for lexical encoding because there

are no situations described by the sense of the verb

dismiss in (4b) that do not require a Source Location.

This can be contrasted to the optional constituent for

John, shown in example (4c). This constituent expresses

a Beneficiary Participant (the entity for whom the giving

was done). Beneficiaries do not pass the obligatoriness

criterion because giving events do not require that the

1 See Dowty (1982) for an early proposal of the role of semantic

obligatoriness in determining argumenthood.

event be done for someone. Because, they do not passthe semantic obligatoriness criterion, beneficiaries are

not candidates for lexical encoding.

Thus far, based on the semantic obligatoriness crite-

rion, both Event Locations and Source Locations are

candidates for lexical encoding. Proposing that Event

Locations are candidates for lexical encoding contra-

dicts most linguists� intuitions. It has been observed in-

formally that Event Locations can co-occur with mostevent-denoting verbs, an intuition that we corroborated

quantitatively, as we discuss below. Our theory of lexical

encoding also requires that the participant information

be specific to a restricted class of verbs. We call this

second condition of lexical encoding the semantic spec-

ificity criterion.

According to the semantic specificity criterion, for a

participant role to be lexically encoded as an argument ofa verb, it must be specific to that verb or to a restricted

class of verbs. The set of argument candidates in exam-

ples (4a) and (4b) changes when the specificity criterion is

applied. While Event Locations are obligatory for all

situations described by the sense of the verb reprimand in

(4a), an Event Location participant is not specific to

events of reprimanding, or to any semantically coherent

group of verbs. Instead Event Locations are obligatoryfor the events described by many verbs, as is illustrated

by the sentences in example (5). In the sentences in (5),

the verb is underlined to demonstrate that Event Loca-

tions are true of a wide variety of verb classes.

(5) a. The notorious felon was beaten in the jail.

b. The seeing-eye dog was slapped in the mall.

c. The ring was scrutinized in the store.

d. The flower was admired in the garden.

e. The unruly child was scolded in the classroom.

f. The gift was presented at the party.

In fact, we have quantified the observation that Event

Location participants are true of the eventualities de-

scribed by almost all verbs. Koenig et al. (2002b, 2003)

had a pair of raters assess all of the verbs in the MRC

psycholinguistics database (Coltheart, 1981), for whe-

ther each described a situation in which an Event Lo-cation was required. Of the approximately 5500 verbs in

the MRC database, 4142 verbs were known to both

raters. And of these, 98.2% required an Event Location.

This confirms our claim that Event Locations are not

specific to a restricted class of verbs. However, if we turn

to Source Location participants, we find that this is not

the case. For the work described in this paper, we had a

different pair of raters assess whether the verbs in theMRC database had a Source Location participant. Each

rater independently determined which verbs required a

Source Location.2 Of the 3615 verbs known to both

2 This leaves open the important question of how small a verb class

has to be in order to be specific. For an extended discussion of this

issue see Koenig et al. (2003).

Table 1

Sample stimuli and their presentation regions

Subject NP Verb D.O. (+with) Final

NP-filler sentences

NP-filler

a. Which sword did the rebels behead the traitor king with [gap] during the rebellion?

b. Which sword did the rebels kill the traitor king with [gap] during the rebellion?

PP-filler sentences

PP-filler

c. With which sword did the rebels behead the traitor king [gap] during the rebellion?

d. With which sword did the rebels kill the traitor king [gap] during the rebellion?


raters, only 11.6% of them required a Source Location.

Thus, unlike Event Locations, which are true of almost

all verbs, Source Locations are only true of a small class

of verbs and therefore meet the specificity criterion.3

Because, Source Locations pass both the semantic

obligatoriness and specificity criteria, while Event Lo-

cations only pass the semantic obligatoriness criterion, a

Source Location is predicted to be lexically encoded asan argument of a verb like dismiss despite being syn-

tactically optional. In contrast, an Event Location,

which is also syntactically optional, is not predicted to

be lexically encoded as a participant role of the verb

reprimand, but rather, is predicted to be an adjunct. One

way to think about the specificity criterion is this: If a

verb�s meaning is specified, in part, by its participants

and their modes of participation in the described situa-tion, then the presence or absence of an Event Location

does not help in individuating the meaning of one verb

from another. However, Source Locations serve to dis-

tinguish the meanings of a restricted class of verbs that

bear a Source entailment from classes of verbs that do

not. Semantic specificity, therefore, affects the encoding

of participant information in the mental lexicon.

If the obligatoriness and semantic specificity criteriatruly serve to identify arguments, we should be able to

find psycholinguistic evidence for this. A recent study by

Koenig et al. (2003) showed that WH-fillers are more

easily integrated into gaps when the participant role as-

sociated with a filler is semantically obligatory but syn-

tactically optional than when a filler is both syntactically

and semantically optional. They compared sentences

containing verbs like behead, which require an Instru-ment participant, to sentences containing verbs like kill,

which allow an Instrument participant, but do not re-

quire one. These sentences are illustrated in Table 1.

Koenig et al. compared the processing of NP WH-

fillers like (a) and (b) in Table 1 to PP WH-fillers like

3 As in Koenig et al. (2002a, 2003), the percentage given here

should be considered an estimate, since all senses of a lemma were

counted as one entry. This means that when a verb had several entries,

only one of which entailed a Source Participant, the verb was marked

as requiring this participant role.

those in (c) and (d). The sentences in (a) and (c) con-

tained a ‘‘behead’’ verb, whose lexical representation

include an obligatory Instrument participant. The sen-

tences in (b) and (d) contained a ‘‘kill’’ verb, whose

lexical representation does not include an obligatory

Instrument participant. The logic of this filler-gap ex-

periment, which is similar to that used in the current

study, depended on the presence of a WH-filler whichwas semantically appropriate to fill the role associated

with the indirect object position, but which was se-

mantically inappropriate to fill the role associated with

the direct object position. For example, in these sen-

tences swords cannot be beheaded or killed. Because

there is a WH-filler, readers will attempt to integrate it,

typically by trying to posit a gap in the direct object

position (Boland et al., 1990, 1995; Clifton & Frazier,1989; Crain & Fodor, 1985; Stowe, 1986; Tanenhaus,

Boland, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1989). Thus, Koenig et al.

predicted and found that readers encounter processing

difficulty as they attempt to integrate the filler (i.e.,

sword) into the direct object position because it is im-

plausible as a Patient of either kill or behead. This

processing difficulty was averted when the verb provided

some semantic evidence that the filler could plausibly beassociated with an indirect object gap. Therefore, fillers

were easier to integrate when filler-gap sentences con-

tained a ‘‘behead’’ verb rather than a ‘‘kill’’ verb. The

fact that sentences whose instrument fillers were re-

quired by the main verb were integrated faster than

fillers whose main verb did not require an instrument

provides evidence for the role of semantic obligatoriness

in determining the lexical encoding of participant in-formation. While these results illustrate the role of se-

mantic obligatoriness in identifying which participants

are lexically encoded in the representation of verbs, they

do not address whether semantic specificity also plays a

role.

2. Experiment

In this study we examine the role of semantic speci-

ficity in distinguishing participant information that is


lexically encoded from participant information that isnot, when both semantic obligatoriness and syntactic

obligatoriness are held constant. We examined the

processing of filler-gap sentences whose verbs differed in

whether the participant roles associated with their op-

tionally expressed Location Participants were specific to

a restricted class of verbs or not. In particular, we

compared the processing of passive filler-gap sentences

like those in Table 2, whose main verb either fell into arestricted class of verbs requiring a Source Location

(e.g., sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs like (b) and (d)) or

fell into the unrestricted class of verbs that require an

Event Location (e.g., sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs

like (a) and (c)).

The sentences in Table 2 are shown segmented into

five presentation regions, the third and fourth of which

were our regions of analysis. The first region includedeither an NP or PP WH-filler. The second and third

regions contained an auxiliary verb plus subject phrase,

and the main verb, respectively. The fourth region,

which was the critical region of analysis, included the

gap to which the WH-filler must be attached, and an

agent by-phrase. For sentences with NP-fillers, this

region also included the preposition in or from. Hence-

forth this region will be referred to as the agentby-phrase region. The final region contained an adver-

bial or prepositional phrase. This region was included

so that end-of-sentence wrap-up effects would not

contaminate reading times in the critical region.

By hypothesis, the lexical semantic representations of

verbs like dismiss in (b) and (d) in Table 2 encode a

Source Location because this participant information is

required of all situations described by this class of verbsand because Source Locations are restricted to a rela-

tively small class of verbs. In contrast, the lexical se-

mantic representations of verbs like reprimand in (a) and

(c) do not encode an Event Location, despite the fact

that Event Locations are semantically obligatory for

these verbs, because Event Locations are not specific to

a restricted class of verbs.

We predicted that NP-filler sentences whose verbsencode a source participant, like (b), should be pro-

cessed more easily than sentences like (a) whose verbs do

not. This is because verbs like dismiss should provide the

Table 2

Sample stimuli and their presentation regions

NP-filler Subject Ver

NP-filler sentences

a. Which office was the incompetent employee repr

b. Which office was the incompetent employee dism

PP-filler Subject Ver

PP-filler sentences

c. In which office was the incompetent employee repr

d. From which office was the incompetent employee dism

reader with lexical-semantic information about a sourcerole for the filler. In contrast, verbs of the ‘‘reprimand’’

class provide no such helpful semantic role information.

Although our experimental sentences were not anoma-

lous, we nonetheless expected processing difficulty to

emerge at the Agent by-phrase region for ‘‘reprimand’’

verb sentences with NP-fillers given that other filler-gap

studies using verbs that subcategorize for more than a

direct object but which have used a plausibility manip-ulation, have found anomaly effects in the word position

immediately following the verb (cf. discussion in

Tanenhaus, Boland, Mauner, & Carlson, 1993). Finally,

following Koenig et al. (2003), we also expected sen-

tences with PP-fillers to be easier to process than sen-

tences with NP-fillers. Sentences like those in (c) and (d)

with fronted PPs that provide readers with a clear syn-

tactic cue for filler integration should be processed moreeasily than sentences like those in (a) and (b), where

there is no syntactic cue aiding filler integration.

2.1. Method

2.1.1. Participants

Eighty native English speaking undergraduates from

the University at Buffalo received partial course creditfor their participation in this study.

2.1.2. Materials and norming

Twenty passive filler-gap sentence quadruples, such

as those in Table 2, were constructed. The sentences

differed only in whether their main verb was a Source

Location verb like dismiss (b) and (d) or an Event Lo-

cation verb like reprimand (a) and (c) and whether thepreposition heading the gap was from or in.

The stimuli presented in Table 2 were extensively

normed. Because information about the semantic fit or

plausibility of particular nouns with respect to real-

world knowledge is used rapidly during on-line sentence

processing (e.g., McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997;

Stowe, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1991; Tanenhaus et al.,

1989; Tanenhaus, Stowe, & Carlson, 1985; Trueswell,Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994), our first norming study

was done to ensure that, within each ‘‘reprimand’’ and

‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence pair, the NPs in the WH-fillers

b (PP) [gap] by-phrase Final

imanded in [gap] by the manager yesterday?

issed from [gap] by the manager yesterday?

b Agent by-phrase Final

imanded [gap] by the manager yesterday?

issed [gap] by the manager yesterday?


(e.g., which office) were equally plausible as event orsource locations, respectively. This norming was done in

two stages. First, separate groups of participants were

asked to provide either (1) highly plausible or (2) pos-

sible but highly implausible fillers for the missing NP of

filler-gap sentences, as shown in example (6). Crucially

the sentences differed in whether they contained a

‘‘reprimand’’ or ‘‘dismiss’’ verb. The pairs presented in

(6) were counterbalanced across two presentation listssuch that each participant saw only one pair member in

each condition and each list contained an equal number

of sentences from each condition.

(6) a. In which _____ was the incompetent employee

reprimanded by the manager yesterday?

b. From which _____ was the incompetent employee

dismissed by the manager yesterday?

When participants were asked to provide highlyplausible fillers for the sentences in (6) they responded

with items like, store, office, and company. When asked

to provide possible but highly implausible fillers, they

listed items like soup kitchen, and taxi. The participant-

generated fillers that were listed most frequently were

shown to a separate group of participants who rated, on

a 7-point Likert scale, how likely this list of plausible

and implausible NPs were as the fillers of either a‘‘dismiss’’ or ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentence frame. The

same counterbalancing constraints that were used in the

first stage of norming were used in this second stage.

The obtained ratings were used to select an NP to

serve as a filler for each sentence quadruple. For each

‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence pair, we se-

lected an NP that had a mean rating that was above the

mean for all of the candidates that had been generatedfor that pair and that was also above the midpoint of the

Likert scale. Differences in the ratings for selected NPs of

‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence frames never

exceeded .55, and when there was a difference, we always

selected an NP that was rated more plausible as an Event

rather than Source Location. The mean plausibility rat-

ings for NP-fillers of ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs was 6.3

(SE ¼ :09), and 6.0 (SE ¼ :1) for ‘‘dismiss’’ verb fillers.In a second study, we normed the resultant NP- and

PP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’

verbs for grammaticality. This was done to rule out the

possibility that any observed differences between ‘‘dis-

miss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences could be due to

island violations, given that many types of extractions

that have been identified as examples of island violation

phenomena elicit judgments of ungrammaticality. Thesentence quadruples presented in (7) were counterbal-

anced across four presentation lists such that each par-

ticipant saw each member of a quadruple in only one

condition and an equal number of sentences in each

condition were included in each list. These sentences

were pseudo-randomly intermixed with 72 control sen-

tences such that no two experimental items appeared

successively. The control sentences represented a varietyof grammatical violations, ranging from mild subject–

verb agreement violations like Patrick write a lot of

poems about nature to palpable island violations like

What did Rob make the claim that he saw on the billboard

as well as 25 grammatical sentences. Participants rated,

on a 7-point Likert scale, how natural each sentence was

as a sentence of English to say, read, or hear. A rating of

1 indicated that the sentence was very unnatural, while arating of 7 indicated that a sentence was fully natural.

(7) a. Which office was the incompetent employee repri-

manded in by the manager yesterday?

b. Which office was the incompetent employee

dismissed from by the manager yesterday?

c. In which office was the incompetent employee

reprimanded by the manager yesterday?

d. From which office was the incompetent employeedismissed by the manager yesterday?

NP-filler sentences with Source and Event location

verbs had mean ratings of 5.3 (SE ¼ :4) and 5.3

(SE ¼ 1:1), respectively. PP-filler sentences with Source

and Event location verbs had mean ratings of 5.1

(SE ¼ :4) and 4.5 (SE ¼ :6), respectively. The mean

rating for sentences with grammatical violations was

3.21 (SE ¼ :17). ‘‘Reprimand’’ verb sentences with PP-fillers were rated as less acceptable than ‘‘reprimand’’

verb sentences with NP-fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 2:74, p < :01, andless acceptable than ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences with PP-

fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 3:58, p < :002, or NP-fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 4:61,p < :0002. While we do not know why these sentences

were found less acceptable, this finding is not a problem

for our hypotheses for two reasons. First, extraction of a

PP adjunct does not constitute an island violation.Second, the ratings for ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences were

still well above the midpoint of the Likert scale and were

still rated as significantly more acceptable than the

control sentences with grammatical violations,

tð65Þ ¼ 4:6, p < :0001.In sum, the results of our norming studies show that

our experimental stimuli were all rated as acceptable,

natural sentences of English and that the NPs in theWH-fillers were equally plausible in all conditions. Thus,

any differences we might observe in on-line processing

are unlikely to be due to either differences in plausibility

or grammaticality.

From the list of sentences normed to be grammati-

cally acceptable with plausible fillers, we selected 20

sentence quadruples like those illustrated in Table 2. The

members of each quadruple were counterbalancedacross four presentation lists such that only one member

of each quadruple appeared on a list and each list con-

tained an equal number of sentences in each condition.

Experimental sentences were pseudo-randomly inter-

mixed with 75 distractor sentences so that no two ex-

perimental items appeared successively. Distractors and

practice sentences contained a number of different


question forms, including Yes–No questions, and WHquestions with NP or PP-fillers extracted from a variety

of syntactic positions. Overall half of the practice items

and distractors contained fronted NPs or PPs (e.g., With

which hammer did Robert take out the rusty nail from the

wall?). Distractor sentences were included to disguise the

nature of the experimental manipulation. Finally, be-

cause participants were asked to judge whether each

sentence they read made sense, 25% of the practice anddistractor sentences were designed not to make sense

(e.g., At what time did the professor pop the balloon that

held the sun in the air?).

2.2. Procedure

Sentences were presented using a participant-paced,

moving window procedure. Each trial began by dis-playing two rows of dashes and blank spaces across a

monitor�s screen. The dashes corresponded to all of the

non-white-space characters of the stimulus sentence. The

WH-filler, subject, verb, and agent by-phrase regions

were all displayed entirely on the first line while the final

region was presented on the second line. To reveal the

first region, participants pressed a ‘‘Yes’’ key, causing the

dashes corresponding to this region be replaced by text.Participants kept pressing the ‘‘Yes’’ key as long as the

sentence they were reading made sense. Each subsequent

press of the ‘‘Yes’’ key caused the just read region to

revert to dashes, while simultaneously revealing text of

the next region. If at any time, a sentence stopped

making sense, participants pressed the ‘‘No’’ key. A

‘‘No’’ response immediately terminated the trial. Read-

ing times and make-sense judgments were collected foreach region. Before beginning the experiment, partici-

pants read some instructions that described the task.

Following the instructions, participants completed 20

practice trials to familiarize themselves with the task and

the response keys before beginning the experiment.

2.3. Results and discussion

With an incremental judgment task, there are typi-

cally two dependant variables, the ‘‘No’’ judgments and

the reading times for sentences that participants con-

Table 3

Mean cumulative percentages of ‘‘No’’ judgments for Source Location (‘‘dism

PP-fillers across five sentence regions

WH-filler Aux verb+ subject

NP-filler 0 0

Source location

NP-filler 0 0

Event location

PP-filler 0 0

Source location

PP-filler 0 .6

Event location

tinue to say ‘‘Yes’’ to. Typically, judgments are used todetect syntactic or semantic anomalies embedded in

sentences. However in this study, there were no em-

bedded anomalies. Our experimental sentences were

normed for grammatical acceptability and for equiva-

lent plausibility of the fillers across conditions. Conse-

quently, we used the judgments as an on-line referendum

of the acceptability of our experimental sentences. We

predicted that there would be few ‘‘No’’ judgments inany condition, and no differences in ‘‘No’’ judgments at

any region across conditions. Because we expected few

‘‘No’’ judgments, the main dependent variable in this

study was the reading times that were elicited at each

region by ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences

with NP- and PP-fillers. These reading times served as

an index of processing effort. Our main prediction was

that ‘‘reprimand’’ sentences with NP-fillers would bemore difficult to process than both the controls with PP-

fillers and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences with an NP-filler,

and hence would elicit longer reading times at the agent

by-phrase region.

2.3.1. Judgments

Percentages of ‘‘No’’ responses were tabulated for

each region. Mean cumulative percentages of ‘‘No’’ re-sponses at each region for ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’

verb sentences with NP- and PP-fillers are shown in

Table 3. Both NP- and PP-filler ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘repri-

mand’’ sentences were judged highly felicitous, eliciting

no more than 7% in the cumulative ‘‘No’’ judgments at

the Agent by-phrase region and no more than 14% in the

cumulative ‘‘No’’ judgments at the final region. These

percentages ‘‘No’’ judgments are comparable to sen-tences judged felicitous in other studies using judgments

as a primary source of data for anomaly detection (e.g.,

Mauner & Koenig, 2000). Because of the low number of

‘‘No’’ responses no statistical analysis is possible.

However, these results indicate that we were successful

in equating experimental sentences for grammaticality

and plausibility.

2.3.2. Reading times

For sentences that readers continued to judge felici-

tous, we computed residual reading times for the verb

iss’’) and Event Location (‘‘reprimand’’) verb sentences with NP- and

Verb Agent by-phrase Final

3 6.9 13.6

1.8 6.9 12.6

.3 3.8 13.9

.8 3.3 10.4

Fig. 1. Residual reading times for verb and agent by-phrase regions.

4 The Brown and Wall Street Journal are text databases in the Penn

Treebank parsed corpus. Although these corpora are relatively small,

consisting of approximately two million words, we used these

databases because they are both convenient and widely available.


and agent by-phrase regions. Residual reading times areshown in Fig. 1. We analyzed residual reading times

rather than raw reading times for each participant be-

cause they partial out the influence of string length

which differed across conditions at the critical agent by-

phrase region (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Trueswell et al.,

1994). These differences were due to the presence of

different prepositions, from and in, across ‘‘dismiss’’ and

‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences with NP-fillers and to theabsence of a preposition in sentences with PP-fillers.

Mean residual reading times at the verb and agent by-

phrase regions of ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb

sentences with NP and PP WH-fillers are presented in

Fig. 1.

Participant and item means were submitted to two

separate 4 (presentation list)� 2(verb class)� 5 (region)

analyses of variances. Although, analyses were con-ducted at all five regions, for the purposes of this paper

we will only present the results for the verb and agent

by-phrase regions, where effects would be most likely to

be observed. All the results discussed here were signifi-

cant at least at p < :05 for both participant and items.

The verb region was processed faster in sentences

with PP-fillers than NP-fillers, but this effect was sig-

nificant only in the analysis by participants. As pre-dicted, at the agent by-phrase region, whether or not a

verb lexically specified a Source Participant significantly

interacted with whether the sentence had an NP or PP

WH-filler. Crucially, NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’

Source Location verbs, like example (b) in Table 2,

elicited significantly faster reading times than NP-filler

sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs, like example (a) in

Table 2. In addition, the processing of PP-filler sen-tences, which provided both semantic and syntactic cues

for filler integration, was significantly faster than the

processing of sentences with NP-fillers, but there was no

difference in reading times between ‘‘dismiss’’ and‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences with PP-fillers. The facili-

tation for sentences with PP-fillers is most likely due to

the fronted preposition providing both syntactic and

semantic cues that the filler is impossible as a direct

object, and therefore must be integrated into the sen-

tences after the direct object position.

These results suggest that when a participant role was

specific to a restricted class of verbs, processing of filler-gap sentences was facilitated. This strongly supports the

hypothesis that specificity plays an important role in

distinguishing participants that are lexically encoded in

the representation of verbs from those that are not.

However, there is an alternative hypothesis that must be

considered, namely that the faster reading times for NP-

filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs relative to sentences

with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs is due to the relative frequencywith which ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs co-occur with from+NP

source phrases and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs occur with

PP+ location phrases.

To test this hypothesis, we examined whether agent

by-phrase reading times for NP-filler sentences with

‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs were predicted by the

frequency with which these verbs co-occurred in a cor-

pus with a PP expressing a Source Location, or a PPexpressing any type of Location, respectively. Note that

this latter analysis is biased towards finding a relation-

ship in that location PPs were not restricted to the

preposition in. We computed the proportion of PPs

headed by from expressing a Source Location that co-

occurred with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs and the proportion of

PPs expressing any kind of location (i.e., Source, Path,

Goal, Participant Location, and Event Location) thatco-occurred with our ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs in the com-

bined Brown and Wall Street Journal corpora.4 We then

regressed the residual reading times at the agent by-

phrase for ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences

with NP-fillers against the percentages of Source or

Location PPs, respectively, that co-occurred with each

‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb. Reading times for

four ‘‘dismiss’’ and three ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentenceswere omitted because their verbs occurred less than four

times in the combined corpora. If the reading times we

obtained are due to differences in the frequency with

which Location PPs co-occur with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘rep-

rimand’’ verbs, then we would expect that frequency

would be negatively correlated with reading times for

both verb classes.

We present scatterplots for these two regressionanalyses in Figs. 2A and B. As Fig. 2A shows, reading

times for NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs that

Fig. 2. (A) Percentages of Source verbs followed by a from+NP source phrase in corpora vs. residual reading time. (B) Percentages of Event

Location verbs followed by a PP+Location phrase in corpora vs. residual reading time.


specify a Source Location are not predicted by the fre-quency with which these verbs co-occur with a PP ex-

pressing a source, r ¼ :133, p > :63. Fig. 2B shows that

reading times for NP-filler sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’

verbs are marginally predicted by the frequency with

which they co-occur with a PP expressing a location,

r ¼ :463, p < :06, but this positive correlation is in the

opposite direction that would be predicted by any ac-

count under which co-occurrence frequencies facilitatereading times, and is also driven entirely by one data

point, corresponding to the verb slap. When this verb is

omitted, the correlation is not significant, r ¼ :003,p < :99.5 While the results of these regression analyses

are consistent with the hypothesis that the frequency

with which a location expressing PP co-occurs with a

5 One reviewer suggested that a more appropriate test of whether

reading times were predicted by Location PP co-occurrence frequen-

cies would be to evaluate whether the correlations between the

percentage of Source and Location PPs co-occurring with ‘‘dismiss’’

and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs, respectively, differed from each other.

Unfortunately, this computation requires a shared variable, and

therefore cannot be computed (Cohen & Cohen, 1983). However, it

was possible to regress residual reading times at the agent by-phrase

region of NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs

against the frequency with which these verbs co-occurred with any

kind of Location PP, and compare the resulting correlation. The

correlation for the Source verbs was not significant, r ¼ :084, p > :75,

and neither was the difference between the correlations, t ¼ 1:41,

p ¼ :17. Because we thought it possible that the frequencies with which

verbs co-occur with Location PPs might be more likely to be correlated

with reading times when readers had information about a Location PP

before encountering the verb, we also regressed reading times for PP-

filler sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs against the

percentage of times these verbs occurred with a Location PP in the

combined Brown and Wall Street Journal Corpora. Neither correla-

tion was significant, psP :23.

verb does not predict filler integration times, these re-sults should be viewed cautiously given that they are

based on frequency statistics culled from a relatively

small sample of text.

3. General discussion

These results support the conclusion that the se-mantic specificity criterion distinguishes the participants

that are lexically encoded as arguments of verbs from

those that are not. Filler-gap sentences were processed

more easily when the lexical semantic representation of

the verb included a Source Location than when it did

not. More specifically, faster reading times were elicited

at the agent by-phrase region immediately following

dismiss verbs, which provided lexical evidence for inte-gration of the NP-filler. These results support the view

that readers use Source Location information that is

associated with dismiss verbs but not reprimand verbs to

project gaps for WH-fillers. In other words, readers

found it easier to integrate fillers into sentences when

they contained a verb that is a member of a restricted

class (characterized by sharing the participant type as-

sociated with the filler) than when it was not. Thishappened in spite of the fact that the participant type

associated with both fillers was semantically obligatory.

The extensive norming makes it unlikely that these re-

sults could be driven the plausibility or grammaticality

of our WH-fillers.

Because all location fillers were rated to be more

plausible for the sentences containing a reprimand verb,

it is unlikely that the results can be attributed to thegeneral conceptual knowledge of readers and the relative


likelihood of particular fillers of participant roles.Rather, the results are likely to stem from the more

‘‘distilled’’ knowledge that strongly associates situation-

types activated upon recognition of verbs and some

participant roles (e.g., the Source Location role in the

case of dismiss verbs), but not others (e.g., the Event

Location role in the case of reprimand verbs). The results

of our grammaticality norming make it unlikely that our

findings are due entirely to differences in the naturalnessof our sentences. Crucially, our corpora study makes it

unlikely that our results are driven by the frequency with

which from+NP source phrases occur with dismiss

verbs, but this result will have to be replicated with a

larger corpus.

These results provide additional evidence that se-

mantic participant information is activated upon the

recognition of a verb. Importantly, as was demonstratedby the results of our corpora study, the semantic par-

ticipant information that is associated with a verb is not

merely an association of the frequency of occurrence of

certain phrases like from+NP source phrases with verbs

like dismiss.

These results contribute to our understanding of how

participant information is encoded in the verbal mental

lexicon. They suggest that semantic specificity affects theencoding of participant information in the mental lexi-

con. However, our findings raise the important question

of how specific participant role information has to be in

order to be encoded in the lexical representation of

verbs. Because Event Locations are required by 98.2%

of verbs they are not hypothesized to be lexically en-

coded. Source Participants, on the other hand, are re-

quired by only 11.6% of verbs and are thereforehypothesized to be lexically encoded. Determining how

specific a participant role must be in order to be encoded

in the mental representation of a verb is a question we

are currently pursuing.

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