Showing papers by "Laurie A. Stowe published in 1989"
TL;DR: The authors investigated parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs and found that lexical expectations may determine the initial structural assignment made by the reader in these sentences, suggesting that models of parsing should incorporate a role for lexical expectation at an early stage of syntactic decision-making.
102 citations
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: The authors discuss the role played in syntactic comprehension by thematic roles and several other issues about the structures of language comprehension will be considered in the context of examining the role of thematic role in sentence comprehension.
Abstract: This paper will discuss the concept of thematic roles and their possible role in sentence comprehension. Thematic roles (Gruber, 1976; Fillmore, 1969; Jackendoff, 1972; Chomsky, 1981, 1982) relate arguments of a word, such as the object of a verb, to the meaning of that word. For instance, the object of put is a theme, or affected object; it is the entity that is moved when an act of putting takes place. Within the context of examining the role played in syntactic comprehension by thematic roles, several other issues about the structures of language comprehension will be considered.
79 citations