Word-Order and Lexical-Semantic Factors Influencing Thematic Role Assignment Strategies in Sentence Comprehension

How do people transform the surface structure of a sentence into the sentence’s intended meaning? Word order is an important cue used by people in sentence comprehension (Bates et al., 1982; Ferreira, 2003). Another important cue is the meaning of individual words (i.e. nouns and verbs) which we refer to as “content words”. In these and many approaches in sentence processing studies, the focus has mainly been in investigating sentences in isolation. Could the processing of prior sentences, however, also play an influential role in sentence processing? Many earlier studies have suggested that context plays a relatively minor role in sentence comprehension, and that within-sentence information tends to dominate extra-sentential contextual cues (Holmes, 1984; Ferreira and Clifton, 1986). However, some studies have reported evidence showing that extra-sentential discourselevel semantic contextual cues (Su, 2004) or extra-sentential syntactic priming cues (Bock, 1986) are not always dominated by within-sentence cues. Of these prior studies, only Bates et al. (1982) and Su (2004) have focussed on how such cues influence agent role assignment in sentence comprehension. In this study, the effects of extra-sentential syntactic priming cues and lexical semantic cues upon sentence comprehension role assignment strategies are investigated. Specifically, this study investigates if agent role assignment strategies are influenced not only by extra-sentential content word order cues but also by the presence of particular extrasentential lexical semantic features.