Verb Bias and Plausability in Monolingual English Speakers: An Eye-tracking Study
Open Access
- Author:
- Radolec, Mackenzy Moran
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Paola Eulalia Dussias, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- verb bias
plausibility
monolinguals
eye-tracking
language processing - Abstract:
- The experiment described in this thesis investigates the contribution of verb bias and plausibility during sentence comprehension. Verb bias refers to the preference that speakers have to use verbs with particular complements. For example, although the verb believe can be followed by a noun phrase complement (I believe the story) or a sentence complement (I believe the story is true), when English speakers use believe, they most often use it with a sentence complement. For this reason, believe is said to be a “sentence complement bias verb”. Plausibility refers to whether a string of words “makes sense” as a syntactic unit. Returning to believe, in the sentence I believe the story “believe the story” is a plausible syntactic unit because “a story” is something that can be “believed.” Conversely, in the sentence I believe the treasure, “believe the treasure” is not a plausible syntactic unit because the semantics of “treasure” is incongruent with the semantics of “believe.” The question addressed here is whether verb bias information is privileged over plausibility information when English speakers are making decisions about the syntactic role of words in a sentence. In other words, if participants read the sentence “I believe the story is true”, at the moment they read the phrase “the story,” will they interpret it as functioning as a direct object because “believe the story” is semantically plausible or will they interpret “the story” as the syntactic subject of an ensuing clause, because believe is a sentential complement bias verb? Data was collected using eye-tracking. Participants were 40 monolingual English speakers. Given that verb bias information is encoded lexically but plausibility information is computer “on the fly”, I predict that verb bias information will be prioritized over plausibility information when participants make decisions about the syntactic function of words in sentences.