A basis for generating expectancies for verbs from nouns.

Full Abstract

We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists between expectancy generation and event-based knowledge? Because verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), deferring expectations until the verb seems inefficient. Both human data and computational modeling suggest that other sentential elements may also play a role in predictive processing and that these constraints often reflect knowledge regarding typical events. We investigated these predictions, using both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents, patients, instruments, and locations, suggesting that event memory is organized so that nouns denoting entities and objects activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role. These computations are assumed to be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.

Author information

Author/s: McRae, Ken (K); Hare, Mary (M); Elman, Jeffrey L (JL); Ferretti, Todd (T);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. mcrae(-atsign-)uwo.ca

Grants: MH6051701 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Memory & cognition (Mem Cognit), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2005-Oct; vol 33 (issue 7) : pp 1174-84

Dates: Created 2006/03/14; Completed 2006/04/13; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 16532852, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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