On the comprehension of active and passive sentences

Abstract In a series of five experiments the ease of processing active and passive sentences was shown to be a function of the prior coding of a perceptual event. When the event was coded in terms of the actor, active sentences were more easily verified, when the event was coded in terms of the receiver of the action, passive sentences were more easily verified. This same pattern was shown to hold for answering active and passive questions. From this it was inferred that a passive sentence can be comprehended directly in the logical object-verb-logical subject word order without recovering its active sentence equivalent base structure. A processing model for the verification of active and passive sentences was proposed in terms of a series of binary comparison operations each of which requires additional time; this model was shown to account for about 90% of the variance in the time Ss required to verify these sentences.

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