The Role of the Verb in Dutch During On-line Spoken Sentence Processing

Drs. D. (Dieuwke) de Goede

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Y. R. M. Bastiaanse, Dr. D. B. den Ouden
Period of employment: 1 January 2002 - 31 December 2005

 

Download the dissertation from the University Library website.

 

In this project the role of the verb during on-line spoken sentence processing is investigated. Although the activation pattern of nouns during on-line sentence processing has been studied extensively, studies on verbs are rare. Much attention has been paid to nouns that are moved from their basic position in the sentence. In English the ‘deep’ or basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO: "Mary reads a book"). However in a sentence like "John likes the book that Mary reads" the object (‘the book’) precedes the verb (‘reads’). In most linguistic theories it is assumed that this ‘surface’ word order has been realized by movement of the object from the end of the sentence to a position earlier in the sentence.

In these and other sentences in which the noun has been moved, on-line reactivation of the noun at its basic position has been found consistently. Psycholinguists assume that this recovery of basic word order is necessary to facilitate sentence understanding.

It is unknown whether moved verbs will be similarly reactivated. Even so, it is unknown what role specific verb characteristics like argument structure play in this process. Dutch is a very suitable language to study the role of the moved verb, because in Dutch matrix clauses the verb is not in its basic position. The basic word order in Dutch is subject-object-verb (SOV), but in matrix clauses the verb appears after the subject (SVO: "Jan leest een boek") instead of after the object.

The main research question of my project is on the activation pattern of moved verbs and the role of the verb in relation to its arguments. The task that I use is called Cross- Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP). This task has proven to be a powerful and sensitive measure of moment-by-moment spoken sentence processing. In the CMLP task subjects listen to sentences and at a specific point during each sentence have to make a lexical decision to probes that appear on a screen. The probes that are used are words that are either related or unrelated to a specific word in the sentence. The CMLP task uses the phenomenon of automatic associative priming to detect the activation of word meanings during sentence comprehension. If a visual probe is primed when presented at a certain point during the sentence, this is taken as evidence that, at that point, the meaning of the relevant (associatively related) word in the sentence is activated.

My project is part of an NWO program that is called  "The role of the verb in Dutch during on-line spoken sentence processing and spoken sentence production" supervised by Prof. Dr. Y.R.M. Bastiaanse and carried out by two graduate students (Drs. F. Wester and me) and a post-doc (Dr. D.B. den Ouden). The program aims to obtain insight in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic processes that are involved in processing and production of verbs in healthy and language-impaired speakers.