Evidence for the immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing

When a verb is followed by an infinitival complement, the particular verb determines whether its subject or object is the understood subject of the infinitive. Thus, the verb “controls” the interpretation of the infinitive (e.g., John promised/persuaded Mary to wash). Frazier and colleagues have argued that verb control information is not immediately accessed and used in sentence processing based on whole-sentence comprehension times. The studies reported here examined the use of verb control using an on-line plausibility monitoring task. Subjects immediately detected incongruities that depended upon their having correctly used control information, indicating that verb control information is rapidly accessed and used. It is argued that the results support an approach to language comprehension that emphasizes the importance of lexical representations in rapidly integrating many of the different sources of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge that need to be coordinated during language comprehension.