Processing Gapped Verbs

The time course was investigated of the processing of “missing” verbs in gapping constructions, such as John ate the hamburger, and Bill __ the hotdog. Native speakers of Dutch silently read Dutch sentences with and without gapping while their EEG was recorded. A left anterior negativity (LAN) was found at the first possible position at which the gapped verb could be detected, at least, for in participants who performed poorly in an end-of-sentence acceptability judgment task. This suggests that some readers do not anticipate the gapped verb, but infer the gapped verb in a bottom-up fashion, resulting in a LAN. Second, a P600 effect was observed for gapping versus no-gapping conditions, the early part of which was unaffected by plausibility. This suggests that the semantic and syntactic integration of a gapped verb is a relatively late process, and involves mechanisms similar to integrating a wh-phrase object with its verb.