This study investigated the influences of prior
discourse context and cumulative syntactic priming
on readers predictions for verb subcategorizations.
An additional aim was to determine whether
cumulative syntactic priming has the same degree of
influence following coherent discourse contexts as
when following series of unrelated sentences.
Participants read temporarily ambiguous sentences
that resolved to sentential complement. The
sentences either followed a discourse context or a
series of scrambled sentences. In addition, the
number of sentences that resolved to a sentential
complement in the preceding sentence set was also
varied. Reading times across the disambiguating and
postdisambiguating regions were recorded. No
significant main effects or interactions were found
for either region. However, follow-up analyses,
using per phoneme reading times and nonparametric
statistics resulted in a significant main effect of
coherence for some comparisons.
discourse context and cumulative syntactic priming
on readers predictions for verb subcategorizations.
An additional aim was to determine whether
cumulative syntactic priming has the same degree of
influence following coherent discourse contexts as
when following series of unrelated sentences.
Participants read temporarily ambiguous sentences
that resolved to sentential complement. The
sentences either followed a discourse context or a
series of scrambled sentences. In addition, the
number of sentences that resolved to a sentential
complement in the preceding sentence set was also
varied. Reading times across the disambiguating and
postdisambiguating regions were recorded. No
significant main effects or interactions were found
for either region. However, follow-up analyses,
using per phoneme reading times and nonparametric
statistics resulted in a significant main effect of
coherence for some comparisons.