Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was. . .") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentencecomplement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models. Many aspects of language comprehension take place rapidly, with readers and listeners making commitments to at least partial interpretations soon after receiving linguistic input (e.g., Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Crain & Steedman, 1985; Frazier, 1989; Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1987; Tyler, 1989). The on-line nature of comprehension has important consequences for syntactic processing (parsing). Immediate interpretation requires some local syntactic commitments even though sentences often contain temporary ambiguities. As a result, readers and listeners will occasionally make incorrect commitments that will require revision when, an ambiguity is resolved at a later point in processing. The frequency of syntactic misanalysis or garden-pathing will depend on the types of commitments made by the system and the information used to determine these commitments. A system that makes complete syntactic commitments using only a restricted domain of syntactically