Integrating Verbs, Situation Schemas, and Thematic Role Concepts

Journal of Memory and Language 44,516–547 (2001)doi:10.1006/jmla.2000.2728, available online at http://www.academicpress.com on

Integrating Verbs, Situation Schemas, and Thematic Role Concepts

Todd R. Ferretti, Ken McRae, and Andrea Hatherell

University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

Linguistic and psycholinguistic theories differ with regard to the conceptual content of verbs’ thematic roles. InExperiments 1 and 2, single-word priming was used to demonstrate that verbs immediately activate knowledge oftypical agents (arresting–cop), patients (arresting–criminal), and instruments (stirred–spoon), but not locations(swam–ocean). Experiment 3 illustrated that verbs prime features common to their patients (manipulating–naive).Experiment 4, a cross-modal sentence priming study, showed that the activation of agent and patient thematic roleconcepts is modulated by syntactic cues. Using an integrative account of the processing of words, thematic roles,and schemas, we conclude that this type of detailed world knowledge is tied tightly to on-line thematic role as-signment, and thus should be considered as part of thematic role knowledge.© 2001 by Academic Press

Key Words:verbs; thematic roles; semantic priming.

Language comprehension involves the rapidynepe ce

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integration of various types of semantic and stactic knowledge (Altmann, Garnham, & Denis, 1992; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Ebhard, & Sedivy, 1995). The fact that peocomprehend language quickly and incremtally suggests that our knowledge structuresorganized so that many types of information be computed and integrated quickly (MarslWilson, 1975). One component of languacomprehension for which the integrative natof processing has been highlighted is that ofsigning a verb’s thematic roles to nouns. For ample, McCawley (1968) presented linguisevidence that syntactic knowledge pertinenthematic role assignment must be integrawith world knowledge. One way to facilitathis integration is by having a verb make avable information about its syntactic argumeand, in addition, the semantic features speto the entities and objects that typically fill various thematic roles. The latter process m

This work was supported by NSERC grant OGP0155

0749-596X/01 $35.00Copyright © 2001 by Academic PressAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

51

1),to the second author and an NSERC postgraduate fellowto the first author. Part of this research formed partT.R.F.’s University of Western Ontario Master’s thesis. Wthank Jeff Elman and Mary Hare for numerous helpful dcussions and comments on earlier drafts.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to McRae, Department of Psychology, Social Science CenUniversity of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5CE-mail: [email protected].

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ate access to the generalized situation struc(which could be realized as a schema) that cresponds to the situations/events to whichrefers.1 The goal of this article is to test thhypothesis by investigating whether readinghearing a verb results in the immediate comtation of information regarding typical agentpatients, instruments, and locations (Experime1, 2, and 3).2 We also test whether the activatioof this situation knowledge is modulated by sytactic cues (Experiment 4). Finally, we devela perspective that draws on the literatures ccerning thematic role processing, sentence cprehension, schema theory, semantic memsemantic priming, inferencing, and autobigraphic memories. We believe that these litetures contain insights that can usefully be ingrated into a single coherent perspective thematic role assignment.

Verb-Specific Thematic Role Concepts

Recently, McRae, Ferretti, and Amyote (199incorporated and extended the important workCarlson and Tanenhaus (1988), Dowty (199

04ship of

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events, actions, processes, and states.2 We use the terms agent, patient, instrument, and loca-

tion to refer to various thematic roles. For our present pur-poses, controversies regarding the precise labels for rolesare irrelevant.

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VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

Fillmore (1968), Gentner (1981), Jackend(1983), and others to construct a theory of matic roles that incorporates verb-specific infmation. McRae et al.’s view includes the notthat it may be beneficial for an account of stence processing if the distinction between stactic and semantic knowledge is blurred. Tfocused on the fact that an important aspecverb meaning and situation structure is the rtions among the entities that commonly paripate. In their view, each of a verb’s themaroles is a concept formed through everyday exriences during which people learn about who what play specific roles in specific situatioThis knowledge then serves as an important straint in on-line language comprehension production. For example, a person’s represetion of the agent role of accuseresults from herexperiences with people who accuse othereveryday episodes and in linguistic descriptiof them. McRae et al. further speculated that knowledge is computed immediately as a conquence of hearing or reading the verb accuse, andthus it is a key factor in driving on-line themaassignment.

McRae et al. (1997) illustrated that peopossess this knowledge and can verbalizeleast some of it by showing that subjects eaproduce features for agent and patient concsuch as “someone who accuses others” or “soone who is accused.” In contrast to general tures such as <cause>, <volitional involvemenand <sentient> on which Dowty (1991) aSchlesinger (1995) have focused, the subjgenerated features were quite specific in natFor example, for “someone who accuses oers,” subjects provided features such as mean>, <is judgmental>, and <is knowledgable>. Note that as in prototype theory, and ctrary to a basic premise of selectional resttions, these features are characteristic rathan defining. McRae et al. used the featuralscriptions to demonstrate that thematic rohave internal structure, analogous to living anonliving thing noun concepts (Rosch & Merv1975). A second group of subjects rated theportance of the features to specific noun c
cepts, such as witness(e.g., the importance of<is knowledgeable> to the concept witness). An
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ND THEMATIC ROLES 517

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estimate of role/filler featural similarity wacalculated as the mean featural importanceing across the thematic role’s features. A thgroup of subjects rated the typicality of nouwith respect to specific thematic roles, as“On a scale of 1 to 7, how common is it fowitness to accuse someone?” Role/filler feural similarity was a strong predictor of rofiller typicality ratings, suggesting that thmatic roles have internal structure and thusrepresented in a similar manner as nomconcepts. Furthermore, this internal structurcaptured by specific world knowledge such<is knowledgeable>.

These experiments do not, however, speathe issue of whether this knowledge is ttightly to a verb or is better considered as paa distinct episodic or semantic memory systMcRae et al. (1997) used theoretical notions fthe models of Hintzman (1986) and McClellaand Rumelhart (1985) to suggest that, in teof on-line processing, specific situation-bathematic knowledge is tied tightly to a verb though it derives from episodic traces. (Nthat this implies a somewhat broader viewlexical semantic memory than is often takin that there are no clear distinctions amoepisodic memory, autobiographical memorand semantic memory, distinctions that wpopularized by Tulving, 1983. See McKooRatcliff, & Dell, 1986, for particularly forcefuarguments against Tulving’s distinctions.) these models, specific episodes are encodetraces laid down in an independent or supimposed form. When a word is read or heathe computed representation is akin to a featbased prototype modulated by the quantity quality of contextual cues in the memory proThus, a computed thematic role concept caviewed as a set of semantic features that cotute the most frequent and/or intercorrelafeatures of the noun concepts that typicallythat role (shaded to various degrees by contFor example, most people have witnessedparticipated in multiple accusing situations. dividuals who fill the agent role of accuseoftenpossess certain features, and these are likely computed as part of the agent role rep
sentation of the verb. That is, the hypothesis is

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518 FERRETTI, MCRAE

not that a list of possible nouns is computrather, a distributed featural-type of represetion is computed that overlaps more or less wvarious lexical concepts.

The present experiments examined wheverbs denoting generalized situations prime tcommon agents, patients, instruments, and ltions. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 used a short S(stimulus onset asynchrony, the time betwthe onset of the prime and target) priming padigm to test this. It was hypothesized thacommon features of situations are computedmediately when a verb is encountered, then ical agents (arresting–cop), patients (arresting–crook), patient features (comforting–upset), andpossibly even instruments (ate–fork) and loca-tions (cooked–kitchen) should be primed fromverbs. To the best of our knowledge, no woword priming research to date has investigasystematically whether verbs make this typeinformation available. Experiment 4 examindirectly whether it is appropriate to consider primed information as thematic role knowledby testing whether syntactic cues modulate avation of common participants. Verbs were psented as part of short auditorally presenactive (She arrested the) and passive (Shearrested by the) sentence fragments, and jects named a visual target (cop) presented atheir offset. Agents and patients were presenin their congruent role (She was arrested by/ cop) and their incongruent role (She arresthe / cop). If priming is found only when nounare in their congruent role, it can be concludthat verb-specific (situation-specific) informtion of this sort should be considered part of tmatic role knowledge.

Spreading Activation Networks

The most common explanation of word–wopriming results is based on the notion of spreing activation in a semantic network (see Ne1991, for an extensive review). Therefore, iinteresting to ask whether spreading activanetworks predict priming of agents, patients,struments, and locations from verbs. The ornal instantiations of semantic networks focu
on noun representations (Collins & Loftus1975; Collins & Quillian, 1969). Further exten
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sions implemented verb meaning into tframework (Gentner, 1975; Rumelhart & Lev1975). A verb’s representation in Gentner’s aRumelhart and Levin’s models included comeaning and thematic links to nodes that stas place-holders for various thematic rolHowever, it is important to note that these tmatic links and nodes included minimal semtic content. For example, Rumelhart and Leassumed that the agent link carried with it information that any noun that could be placin that node must be animate; in other worthe semantic content was restricted to genselectional restriction information. Because experiments reported in this article control general selectional restrictions, this model pdicts no priming.

If one was willing to expand current semannetworks, it could be assumed that a verb nbecomes linked to noun nodes representingcommon agents, patients, instruments, and ltions over time as a result of experience with uations to which the verb refers, and linguisdescriptions of them. These links could resfrom people noticing that, for example, arenare associated with skating, or via word occurrence in speech and text. In this viwhen subjects read the verb prime in our pring experiments, activation would then spreadthe node corresponding to the target conceptpriming would result. Thus, if spreading activtion networks incorporate ad hoc assumptiwell outside the scope of current versions, tcould predict priming of agents, patients, instments and locations from verbs.

A second way in which spreading activatinetworks might predict priming from verbs typical role fillers is via undifferentiated linkthat encode associative relatedness. If all woor concepts that tend to co-occur frequentlysituations and language become linked in mantics, and/or orthography and phonology an associative relation, then priming from veto typical role fillers might result. The standaoff-line method for determining whether twwords or concepts share an associative linword association norms. It has been argued in
,-vious research that if subjects frequently produceone word given another in a word association

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VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

task, then those concepts share an assoclink, and facilitation should obtain in an on-linpriming task (Neely, 1991). This hypothesisevaluated in each of the four experiments.

Schemas

A view of structured knowledge represention that allows for priming of agents, patieninstruments, and locations from verbs is thaschema theory. Researchers have proposnumber of mental structures designed to cappeople’s world knowledge about situationwith the most common forms being schem(Rumelhart, 1980; Rumelhart & Ortony, 197scripts (or event–memory organization pack(Kolodner, 1983; Shank & Abelson, 1977), aframes (Fillmore, 1968; Minsky; 1975). We uthe term “schema” to illustrate ideas in this acle, although we use it in a sufficiently geneway that it should be regarded as encompasthe entire family of schema-like concepts.

According to schema theory, knowledge tpeople possess about the world is packagedunits, including information about objects, siations, and sequences of situations. In most sions, situations are organized into structulists of slots (variables), each of which can ctain fillers (values). The slots represent the geral dimensions of a concept along with thdefault values. For example, the schema cosponding to arresting situations would includslot that specifies the agent or “arrester,” whmay have a range of values such as “poli“soldier,” and “security guard.” In some vesions of schema theory, the default value for“arrester” slot would be “police” because it the most frequent. According to early persptives, schemas and their corresponding defawere viewed as highly structured informatistored in memory and accessed directly fromMany researchers have recognized the inaquacy of these views and have suggested mflexible mechanisms to specify how schemare organized and used on-line (RumelhSmolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, 1986). Suproposals include connectionist approacto knowledge representation (McClelland Rumelhart, 1985) and instance-based or ex
plar views (Hintzman, 1986). The major insigh

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of the connectionist and instance-based pspectives is that schemas are not explicit eties stored in memory and directly accesfrom it; rather, they are computed on-line in tcontext of the situation or utterance currenbeing interpreted.

The organization of situations in memory hplayed an important part in constraining theries of autobiographical memories (AndersonConway, 1997; Lancaster & Barsalou, 19Reiser, Black, & Abelson; 1985). Of particulinterest has been the level of abstraction thamost likely to capture information encoded memory about our experiences. For examplsituation such as “eating at a restaurant” canviewed as a superordinate concept that inclusubordinate levels capturing generalized sittions, such as “eating”, “paying,” and “ordeing.” In addition, generalized situations mhave a subordinate level of representation, sas “lifting a fork” (Reiser et al., 1985). The milevel of abstraction, which is captured by genalized situations, can be viewed as correspding to the basic level that has been shownnumerous researchers to have a privileged sin cognition (Rosch et al., 1976). Researchagree that generalized situation schemas areportant for organizing people’s experiences, that these structures can include detailed cific knowledge. In fact, a great deal of reseaillustrates the important functions that geneized situation knowledge plays during languacomprehension (Bower, Black, & Turner, 197Golden & Rumelhart, 1993; Potts, Keenan,Golding, 1988). In the sentence processing liature, this knowledge has been shown to bkey component of syntactic ambiguity resotion (McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhau1998; Schmauder & Egan, 1998; TarabanMcClelland, 1988), expectancy generationsentence processing (Altmann & Kamide, 199and lexical ambiguity resolution (Till, Mross, Kintsch, 1988; Vu, Kellas, & Paul, 1998). In tharticle, we are interested in how this knowedge is tapped when people read or hear vthat denote generalized situations and, mspecifically, the information made availab

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Despite numerous demonstrations that gealized situation knowledge is an essential asof comprehension, scant research has integrit with a proposal regarding the conceptual formation made available by verbs about sittions and their common properties. Clearly, termining the level of detail of this informatiois an important step toward understanding on-line availability of situation knowledge. Onof the main reasons for this lack of synthesithat thematic role knowledge has traditionabeen viewed as distinct from world knowledabout the situations verbs denote, particularlany theory that has emerged from the generatradition (e.g., Caplan, Hildebrandt, & Wate1994; Schlesinger, 1995; but see Johnson-La1983, and McCawley, 1968, for a contrastview). Thus, research examining thematic rinformation has tended to focus on syntacticformation, whereas research on schemas tended to ignore thematic role knowledge a
assignment. One goal of this article is to wo
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EXPERIMENT 1: SINGLE-WORD PRIMINGOF AGENTS AND PATIENTS

Experiment 1 addresses the issue of wheverbs immediately make available informatiabout agents and patients. In terms of situastructure, they are a good place to start bechuman empirical studies and computatiomodels suggest that participant informationsalient (Barsalou, 1988; Kolodner, 1983; Lacaster & Barsalou, 1997). Moreover, it makintuitive sense that agents and patients, parlarly human ones, are salient aspects of sitions because people are social beings and erally attend to the activities of others.

We used the following guidelines to develstimuli. First, on the basis of intuition, we selecverbs referring to situations that frequently clude an agent and/or patient. For example, aresting situation necessarily includes somedoing the arresting and someone being arrethe agent and patient are intrinsic to the situa(Verfaillie & Daems, 1996). Linguistically, thitype of situation tends to be expressed by a trative verb. Second, we chose verbs that are like
activate agent and patient information in a stro
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coherent fashion, that is, verbs with well-definagent and patient semantic spaces. McRae (1997) characterized a thematic role as well-fined if the typical participants for that role tendbe mutually semantically similar. According this view, when a verb is read or heard, a distprototype is likely to be computed for a given thmatic role if the entities or objects that typicaplay that role share a cluster of features (e.g.agent role of arrest). A thematic role might nohave a distinct computed prototype if the senouns that typically fill the role express few feural regularities and/or if there is no set of exeplars that stand out in terms of the frequencyplaying the role. For example, the patient rolemoveis not well defined because many things be moved and their features do not highly over

The third criterion was to use targets corsponding to typical participants in the situatidenoted by the verb prime for either the agenthe patient role, but not both. Thus, McRet al.’s (1997) role/filler typicality norms werused to select typical agents/atypical patie(“good agents”) and atypical agents/typical tients (“good patients”). In this task, subjewere asked to provide ratings for questions sas, “How common is it for a cop to arrest somone?” Finally, because a number of researchave claimed that a verb’s argument structincludes only syntactically relevant selectionrestrictions such as <animacy> (Choms1965), all targets were animate so that subjeresponses could not be based on this feature

We tested for immediate activation of partipant information using a short SOA priming padigm. With visual presentation of primes atargets and an SOA of 250 ms or less, primingfects are not due to strategic expectancy gention that is thought to occur at longer SOAs Groot, 1984; den Heyer, Briand, & Dannenbri1983; Stolz & Neely, 1995). Given that our gois to demonstrate that verbs make thematic conceptual information immediately availabwe used visual presentation of primes and tarwith an SOA of 250 ms in Experiments 1, 2, a3 (Experiment 4 used auditory sentence frments as primes). In Experiment 1, subjects ma semantic (animacy) decision to each target

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VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

mantic decisions such as “Does this word refesomething that is alive?” better tap semantic avation than do lexical decision or naming (salso de Groot, 1984; McRae & Boisvert, 199As demonstrated by Balota and Chumb(1984), lexical decisions are based on a combtion of orthographic, phonological, and semanfamiliarity, whereas we are most interested inmantic computations. However, it is not alwapossible to construct a semantic decision thatcompasses all targets, so that lexical decisionaming can be used in these cases. Therefosemantic decision task was used in Experimebecause we could easily derive one that resuin an unambiguous “yes” response for all of target nouns. In summary, Experiment 1 usedanimacy decision task in a short SOA primtask to test whether verbs prime agents andtients.

Experiment 1a: Single-Word Priming of Agen

Method

Subjects. Twenty-six subjects participated fcourse credit, thirteen per list. In all experimereported in this article, subjects were natEnglish-speaking psychology undergraduafrom the University of Western Ontario who hnormal or corrected-to-normal vision. Each sject participated in only one of the experimereported herein.

Materials. The 28 primes were verbs endinging and the corresponding targets were nounsferring to animate entities (see Appendix A). Ttypicality of the noun in terms of filling the verbagent role was determined from a norming streported in McRae et al. (1997). Subjects ratedagenthood of each verb–noun combination (a1a) on a 7-point scale, where 1 correspondevery uncommon and 7 to very common.

(1a) How common is it for acrook ———cop ———guard ———police ———suspect ———

to arrest someone?To ensure that facilitation was being produc
via the agent role, rather than both the ag

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(1b) How common is it for acrook ———cop ———guard ———police ———suspect ———

to be arrested by someone?The agenthood ratings of the 28 verb–agpairs were high (M = 6.6, range= 6.1–6.9) anddid not overlap with their patienthood rating(M = 2.1, range= 1.3–3.8), t2(27) = 37.31.3

Two lists were constructed, each containingrelated verb–agent pairs, such asscrubbing–jani-tor, and the remaining 14 agents paired with unlated verbs, such asarresting–parent. Unrelatedpairs were formed by re-pairing the related cobinations and are presented in Appendix A. Theach target noun served as its own control, andsubject saw any word more than once. Eachalso contained 112 filler trials consisting of 1verb–noun combinations with related inanimatargets (turning–knob), 42 with unrelated animatetargets (scheduling–actress), and 56 with unre-lated inanimate targets (annoying–jar). Thus, therelatedness proportion was 0.2 (28/140) and hof the target nouns referred to animate entities ahalf to inanimate objects. Finally, there were 3practice trials consisting of 6 related (3 with anmate targets and 3 with inanimate targets) andunrelated trials (12 with animate targets andwith inanimate targets). The practice and filler tals were identical for both lists.

Procedure. Stimuli were displayed on a 14-imonitor controlled by a Macintosh using PsScope (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provo1993). Each trial consisted of the followinevents: a focal point (+) in the center of the screefor 250 ms; the prime for 200 ms; a ma(&&&&&&&&&) for 50 ms; and the target untilthe subject responded. The intertrial interval w

entnoted; F1 and t1 refer to analyses by subjects, whereas F2

and t2 refer to analyses by items.

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522 FERRETTI, MCRAE

as quickly and accurately as possible. In Expments 1a, 1b, 2, and 3, in which manual deciswere required, a subject’s dominant hand used to indicate a “yes” response, and latenwere recorded with millisecond accuracy viaCMU button box that measured the time betwthe onset of the target word and the button prTesting sessions began with the practice trSubjects were given a break every 40 triIt took approximately 20 min to complete ttask.

Design. Response latencies and square roothe number errors (Myers, 1979) were analyby two-way analyses of variance. Relatedn(related vs unrelated) was within subjects (F1)and items (F2). List was included as a betweesubjects dummy variable and item rotatgroup as a between-items dummy variablestabilize variance that may result from rotatsubjects and items over lists (Pollatsek aWell, 1995). Note that these factors were cluded in the analyses of all on-line data ported in this article. Also, in all experimentstrial was excluded from the latency analysethe response was incorrect.

Results

Decision latencies. Response latencies greathan three standard deviations above the gmean were replaced by that upper-limit va(1% of the scores). Animacy decision latencfor agent nouns following related verbs (M =654 ms, SE= 18 ms) were 27 ms shorter thfor the same nouns following unrelated ve(M = 681 ms, SE = 21 ms), F1(1,24) = 7.73,F2(1,26) = 5.85.

Errors. There was not a reliable differenceerror rates for related (M = 5.2%, SE = 1.4%)versus unrelated pairs (M = 7.1%, SE= 2.2%),F1 < 1, F2(1,26) = 2.11, p > .1.

Experiment 1b: Single-Word Priming of Patients

Method

Subjects. Thirty-two subjects participated focourse credit, sixteen per list.

Materials. As in Experiment 1a, the typicalit
of the noun in terms of filling the verb’s patien
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and agent roles was determined from a normstudy reported in McRae et al. (1997). The ptienthood ratings for the 18 verb–patient pawere high (M = 6.4, range = 5.6–7.0) and didnot overlap with their agenthood ratings (M =1.8, range= 1.0–3.8), t2(17) = 28.02. All patientnouns referred to animate entities and are psented in Appendix B.

Two lists were constructed, each containi9 related pairs, such as arresting–crook, and theremaining 9 patients paired with unrelated versuch as teaching–celebrity. Unrelated pairs wereformed by re-pairing the related combinationThus each target noun served as its own conand no subject saw any word more than onEach list also contained 72 filler trials consistiof 9 verb–noun combinations with related inamate targets (turning–knob), 27 with unrelatedanimate targets (scheduling–actress), and 36 withunrelated inanimate targets (annoying–jar). Thus,the relatedness proportion was 0.2 (18/90) half of the targets referred to animate entities ahalf to inanimate objects. The 30 practice trifrom Experiment 1a were used again. The prtice and filler trials were identical for both lists

Procedure. The procedure was identical Experiment 1a.

Design. The design was identical to Expement 1a.

Results

Decision latencies. Response latencies greatthan three standard deviations above the grmean were replaced by that upper-limit val(1% of the scores). Animacy decision latencfor patient nouns following related verbs (M =661 ms, SE= 20 ms) were 32 ms shorter thathose for the same nouns following unrelatverbs (M = 693 ms, SE = 23 ms), F1(1,30) =7.58, F2(1,16) = 4.73.

Errors. There was not a reliable difference error rates for related (M = 9.4%, SE = 1.7%)versus unrelated pairs (M = 9.0%, SE= 1.6%),F1 < 1, F2(1,16) = 1.03, p > .3.

Discussion

Experiments 1a and 1b demonstrate th

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VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

they refer. This is the first word–word priminstudy to test systematically whether verbs tlabel situations facilitate nouns that label partipants in them. In the study most similar to ouSchriefers, Friederici, and Rose (1998) showthat verbs (write) prime common patients (let-ter) when presented in short phrases such“He writes the” (in German). However, note ththe phrases were presented for 800 ms, whmight be a relatively long SOA. We interpret oresults as demonstrating that memory is strtured so that when a verb is read or heard, geralized situation knowledge is activated.salient part of this knowledge is the informatioregarding the types of agents and patientstend to participate. Because the verbs were tsitive and presumably possessed well-defiroles, and further, because the agents andtients were semantically similar to the prototyical agents and patients for their respective sations, priming was obtained. An accountwhich verbs tap situation schemas is consiswith these results.

Associative Relatedness in SpreadingActivation Networks

One possibility is that priming was due to asociative links within semantics, orthograpand/or phonology that may have developed to frequent co-occurrence of words and threferents (Shelton & Martin, 1992). The verfrom Experiments 1 and 2 do co-occur in speand text with their related agents and patieprecisely because their combination in world is common. A standard method of testfor associative relatedness (which is assumereflect co-occurrence, Spence & Owens, 19is to use a word association task. In the mostquently used version of this task, the expmenter reads a word aloud and the subject bally produces the first word that comes mind. Word pairs such as doctor–nurseare con-sidered associated if a number of subjects vide the same response (nurse) to a particularstimulus (doctor).

Using this methodology, the verbs of Expements 1 and 2 were read aloud to subjects
orally produced the first word that came mind. Various other verbs and nouns were us
res


atc-s,ed

ast

ichrc-n-

Anhatan-edpa--

tu-innt

s-y,ue

eirsch

ntsheg to0)

fre-ri-er-to

ro-

ri-ho

to

as filler items in these norms. Related targwere tallied and a verb–noun pair was conered associated if the noun was produced toverb by greater than 5% of the subjects, whica conservative criterion when compared to otpriming experiments that have aimed to elimnate associatively related items from their stuli (Moss et al., 1995; Shelton & Martin, 1992Two of the 28 verb–agent pairs from Expement 1a were associated: 3 of 20 subjects duced doctor when given curing, and 2 of 20produced artist to sketching. In addition, theagent was produced by a single subject 6 other verbs, whereas no subject producedagent for the remaining 20. To test whether priming effects were due solely to associatrelatedness, the data were reanalyzed aftemoval of the two associated items. The resul34-ms verb–agent priming effect was signcant: related, M = 654 ms, SE = 18 ms; unre-lated, M = 688 ms, SE= 21 ms; F1(1,24) = 8.83,F2(1,24) = 8.32. A separate set of 20 subjeparticipated in a word association study for 18 verb–patient pairs from Experiment 1b. the 18, 3 were associated: 5 of 20 subjects duced criminal for convicting, 3 produced pigfor slaughtering, and 2 produced guestfor invit-ing. Furthermore, 1 subject produced suspectfor investigating, whereas no subject producthe patient when given the verb for the remaing 14 items. The data were reanalyzed aftemoval of the three associated items and thesultant 38-ms verb–patient priming effect wsignificant: related, M = 660 ms, SE = 20 ms;unrelated, M = 698 ms, SE= 24 ms; F1(1,30) =6.20, F2(1,13) = 4.59, p < .06. In summary, associative relatedness, at least as measured via dard word association norms, does not accofor the results of Experiment 1.

Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Sentence comprehension research indicwhy it is imperative that people’s memory be ganized efficiently to support priming of this soIt has been established that the interpretatiomeaning is bound tightly to the unfolding of tstimulus (Marslen-Wilson, 1975). Understandlanguage incrementally without delay requi
edcomputing and integrating a broad range of infor-

,

tionlol

h

ifisnimc

h

n

N

eeus

tefin

inmo

beoaden

ina spreading activation network.

om- ar-sur- iss.eri-pi-

entatehlymy in-ir

m-re- 2.are

ed

herin-wasuch ex-nlyin- oringat-tohat2),rd-rds

ff,wassts

524 FERRETTI, MCRAE

mation. Therefore, it is somewhat perplexing thsome researchers claim that access to informaregarding generalized situation structures is sand occurs only via inferential processes (Cucover, 1988; Schlesinger, 1995; but see also Grod & Sanford, 1981). Experiment 1 suggests tthis is not the case.

McRae et al. (1997) claimed that verb-specthematic role knowledge is critical to the proceof assigning nouns to their thematic roles durion-line sentence comprehension. In that veMcRae et al. (1998) showed that it is used imediately to resolve structural ambiguities suas the main clause/reduced relative clause amguity, as in (2).

(2a) The cop (who was) arrested by the dtective was guilty of taking bribes.

(2b) The crook (who was) arrested by tdetective was guilty of taking bribes.

Comprehending these sentences, eithertheir full relative clause form (with who waspresent) or their reduced form (when they amade ambiguous by dropping who was), re-quires interpreting the initial NP as the patieof the initial verb (i.e., the past participle ar-rested in 2). This contrasts with the dominanEnglish word order; when a sentence begins “verbed,” the NP is usually the agent and verbedis usually the main verb (Bever, 1970). McRae al. demonstrated that the thematic fit betwethe initial NP and the verb’s thematic roles inflenced ambiguity resolution at the earliest posble point, that is, at arrested byin (2). In addition,they simulated the data using an implemenconstraint-based model in which verb-specithematic role knowledge was computed aused immediately. Note, however, that it was npossible in their study to isolate the effects of formation computed from the noun versus frothe verb because both had been read by the pat which effects were found. Experiment shows that the verb provides a consideraamount of situation-related information, and rsults from studies of syntactic ambiguity reslution such as McRae et al., (1997, 1998), Pemutter and MacDonald (1992), and Schmauand Egan (1998) suggest that this knowledgstructured in a manner that differentiates amo
thematic roles, further suggesting that more
AND HATHERELL

atrequired than undifferentiated associative links

wli-ar-at

csgn,-hbi-

e-

e

in

re

t

tP

tn-i-

dcdot-

int1le--rl-er isg

EXPERIMENT 2: SINGLE-WORD PRIMINGOF INSTRUMENTS AND LOCATIONS

Because agents and patients are salient cponents of situations and are frequently coreguments of transitive verbs, perhaps it is not prising that agent and patient informationcomputed quickly and efficiently from verbExperiment 2 used the same logic as Expment 1 to investigate whether verbs prime tycal instruments (stirred–spoon) and locations(swam–ocean).

Some factors indicate that verb–instrumpriming should occur, whereas others indicotherwise. Verbs and instruments are often higintertwined. Nagy and Gentner (1990) and Tal(1975) have argued that English verbs oftencorporate instrument information into themeaning. That is, verbs such as stir and cutmaycarry information about instruments, and priing should result if this is so. In fact, this is pcisely the type of verb used in ExperimentFurthermore, a number of verbs in English derived from instruments, such as to hammerand to brush, but this type of verb was not usin Experiment 2.

A number of studies have tested whetcomprehenders routinely make instrument ferences, such as inferring that a hammer involved when presented with a sentence sas “He pounded the boards together.” Theseperiments reveal instrument inferences ounder limited conditions, including when the strument has been previously mentionedwhen its presence is necessary for maintaincoherence (Lucas et al. 1990; McKoon & Rcliff, 1981), when subjects are instructed guess the implied instrument prior to a test tprobes its activation (Dosher & Corbett, 198or when an inference is supported by wobased priming from semantically related woin the text (such as mallet priming hammer;Keenan & Jennings, 1993; McKoon & Ratcli1989). Because none of these conditions met in Experiment 2, this literature sugge
isthat priming may not occur. Finally, research on

N

g

n

lnioca

cai 8ntuynsn

treetr

ge if 7n aruae

trlab

r

de

heery

ru-wfol-e-

fol-g

allorm

erh

rb–nded

ls

he

Toord

o the

ch nolistsm-onsreingofrds.04)theon-ly,tedun-and

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

autobiographical memories provides no insiinto instruments because instrument informtion has not been studied.

Verb–location priming is expected because merous situations tend to occur in a limited ranof semantically similar locations (e.g., peoptypically swim in lakes, oceans, or pools), aExperiment 2 featured this type of verb–locatpair. Furthermore, studies of autobiographiand narrative memories indicate that people adept at accessing location information in reand recognition tasks, and they often organnewly learned sets of situations on the basisshared location (Brown & Schopflocher, 199Lancaster & Barsalou, 1997). On the other halocations are less salient components of sitions than are agents or patients, and possiblstruments as well. Locations are, in a real sebackground, and rarely are part of the caustructure of a situation, whereas agents, patieand instruments generally are.

The method of Experiment 2 was similar Experiment 1. The item selection criteria weidentical. Verbs were chosen that we believhad well-defined instrument or location thmatic roles. Norms established that the insments and locations were typical for the sitution described by the verb. The priminparadigm was identical except that Experim1 involved a semantic decision task becauseassumed to provide a more direct measure omantic activation (Joordens & Becker, 199However, we were unable to devise a semadecision that we were confident would evokeunambiguous “yes” response for the instments and locations, so a lexical decision twas used. It was hypothesized that if the Expiment 2 verbs immediately tap situation knowedge that promotes the computation of insment or location representations that oversubstantially with the target, priming should obtained.

Method

Subjects. Fifty-eight subjects participated focourse credit, twenty-nine per list.

Materials. Twenty-six verb–instrument antwenty-six verb–location pairs were chos
from a norming study in which 40 subjects rate
D THEMATIC ROLES 525

hta-

u-geednalrell

zeof;d,a-

in-se,alts,

oed-u-a-

ntt isse-).ticn-

skr-

l-u-p

e

n

the typicality of instruments or locations for tsituation denoted by a verb on a scale of 1 (vuncommon) to 7 (very common). The instment norming question took the form of “Hocommon is it for someone to use each of the lowing to perform the action of stirring?” Thlocation question took the form of “How common is it for someone to skate in each of the lowing locations?” The mean typicality ratinwas high for the 26 instruments (6.3, range =5.6–6.9) and the 26 locations (6.7, range =6.0–7.0) (see Appendices C and D).

All primes were past-tense verbs, and word targets were nouns. The past-tense fwas used as opposed to the ing form used in Ex-periments 1 and 3 because an ing ending oftenresulted in an adjective-like pairing with thnoun target (e.g., served–platterwas used rathethan serving–platter). There were two lists, eaccontaining 26 verb–instrument and 26 velocation items. Both the verb–instrument averb–location trials were divided into 13 relattrials (e.g., dug–spadeand swam–ocean) and 13unrelated trials (e.g., shot–spoonand exercised–synagogue) in each list. The unrelated triawere formed by re-pairing the related verb–nouncombinations, with four exceptions. Four of tverbs, fished, hunted, gambled, and ate, wereused with both an instrument and a location.ensure that no subject encountered any wmore than once, these verbs were changed tsemantically similar verbs trawled, tracked, bet,and devouredfor the unrelated trials. Thus eatarget noun served as its own control, andsubject saw any word more than once. Both included the same set of 156 filler trials coposed of 52 unrelated verb–noun combinatiand 104 verb–nonword trials. All nonwords wepronounceable and were formed by changone or two letters of an English word. Half the targets were words, and half were nonwoThe relatedness proportion was 0.25 (26/1and the nonword ratio was 0.57 (104/182, proportion of unrelated targets that were nwords; Neely, Keefe, & Ross, 1989). Final24 practice trials were constructed (2 relaverb–instrument, 2 related verb–location, 8 related verb–noun, and 12 verb–nonword)
dused in conjunction with both lists.

,

xn

ai

cee

ff

-bp

la

o

nla

llyin-ith-ess

ing

a-ion

re

rn,the

e-ar-or-ent in-eral-

meentdeden-

526 FERRETTI, MCRAE

Procedure. The procedure was identical to Eperiment 1 except that the target was preseuntil the subject made a lexical decision.

Design. Lexical decision latencies and squroot of the number of errors were analyzed usthree-way analyses of variance. The factorsinterest were thematic role (instrument vs lotion), which was within subjects but betweitems, and relatedness (related vs unrelatwhich was within subjects and items. Planncomparisons investigated the relatedness eseparately for instruments and locations.

Results

Mean lexical decision latencies and perceage of errors are presented in Table 1.

Decision Latencies. Lexical decision latencies greater than three standard deviations athe grand mean were replaced by that uplimit value (1% of the scores). Thematic roand relatedness interacted, F1(1,56) = 9.68,F2(1,48) = 14.78. Planned comparisons reveathat the interaction occurred because there w32 ms priming effect for instruments, F1(1,56) =14.04, F2(1,48) = 21.74, whereas the −5 ms ef-fect for locations was in the wrong directiwith F < 1 in both analyses.

Collapsing across instruments and locatioresponse latencies were 13 ms shorter for reverb–noun combinations (M = 644 ms, SE= 11ms) than for unrelated ones (M = 657 ms, SE=
12 ms), F (1,56) = 8.25, F (1,48) = 7.56.
etedn-

tedl toer-, iftiesen-for

ts,

- as–in-ces

03

aSignificant by subjects and items.

AND HATHERELL

-ted

reng ofa-nd),

edect

nt-

oveer-le

eds a

n

s,ted

la-

tencies for instruments (M = 655 ms, SE= 11 ms)and locations (M = 646 ms, SE= 12 ms) did notsignificantly differ, F1(1,54) = 1.95, p > .1, F2 < 1.

Finally, note that using the four semanticasimilar verbs for the unrelated trials did not fluence the results. In analyses conducted wout those items, thematic role and relatednstill interacted, F1(1,56) = 12.18, F2(1,40) =17.36. Furthermore, there was a 37 ms primeffect for instruments, F1(1,56) = 16.23,F2(1,40) = 22.51, whereas the effect for loctions remained small and in the wrong direct(−8 ms), F1 < 1, F2(1,40) = 1.11, p > .2.

Errors. No differences in error rates wereliable.

Discussion

The two main results are discussed in tuthe robust priming for instruments, and then lack of priming for locations.

Instruments. The results show that verbs dnoting situations that commonly involve a nrow range of instruments make available infmation about their typical instruments whthey are read in isolation. This suggests thastrument representations are part of the genized situation schemas that verbs tap.

These results appear inconsistent with sostudies of instrument inferencing, but consistwith others. Instrument inferences have tento be found when the verb in the inference-gerating sentence is directly and strongly relato the instrument (Cotter, 1984; Garrod & Saford, 1981). In fact, Garrod and Sanford stathat “for any experimental study, it is essentiause verbs that very strongly imply (and prefably require) the existence of certain entitieswe are to test the idea that these implicit entimay form part of the representation of a stence” (p. 335). In contrast, Singer (1979), example, used verbs such as clear and look thatdid not necessarily entail specific instrumenand found that instruments such as shovelandtelescope, respectively, were not routinely inferred. Thus, we predict that if studies suchLucas et al. (1990) and Singer used our verbstrument pairs, then instrumental inferen

of

would occur even if the instruments were not

1 2

Finally, collapsing across relatedness, respons

TABLE 1

Mean Lexical Decision Latencies (ms) and PercentageErrors for Experiment 2

DependentInstrument Location

measure M SE M SE

Decision latencyUnrelated 671 16 643 17Related 639 14 648 17Facilitation 32a −5

Percentage of errorsUnrelated 7.3 1.8 4.6 1.Related 5.6 1.3 4.3 1.Facilitation 1.7 0.3

mentioned explicitly in the context.

N

mAtin

iso

o s rthsreia&&ethania-axoitren

ioa

deioeneaa

eeeao

thehat

the of

ter-blets-

ectot thehe

onver,f lo-blyre-ossi-the by

va-t aswithnum-ed,al-orer-an

ithcan

thetheca-tru-er-ndnu- la-on-rs:

etru-

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

The relationship between word-based priing and inferencing has been controversial. counts of inferencing based on the assumpof modularity of various components of the laguage system have stressed that word-bapriming and inferencing are distinct. In thcase, an inference is considered to have curred when the reader fully instantiates it intproposition (Keenan et al., 1990; KeenanJennings, 1993). Thus, analogous to theorielexical access such as that of Coltheart et(1994), there is a “magical moment” for infeencing (see Balota, 1990, for a critique of notion of a magical moment for lexical accesAn alternative approach is that inferencing sults from a complex set of processes in whconstraints operate continuously to modulactivation of conceptual information (Golden Rumelhart, 1993; Kintsch, 1988; McKoon Ratcliff, 1989; Sanford & Garrod, 1990). Thobjective of this approach is to understand conditions that lead to encoding this informtion. McKoon and Ratcliff have argued extesively that word-based priming is a potentcontributor to inferential activity in that inferences are more likely to be drawn when the propriate information is readily available. Eperiment 2 suggests that the availability instrument information, and thus the probabilof sustained activation, is increased by the pence of a verb with a well-defined instrumerole. Finally, note that the same conclusstands for the agent and patient roles. For exple, a police-type person might be inferred froa sentence such as “She was arrested yester

Locations. No priming was obtained for thverb–location items. One possible explanatfor any null effect is that the experiment lacksensitivity. However, there were 26 items a56 subjects, so that each datum in the subjanalyses was based on 13 verb–location pand each datum in the items analyses was bon 28 subjects, so that the data presumably wreliable and stable. Furthermore, relatednwas within subjects and items, providing furthsensitivity. In addition, examination of the rolfiller typicality norms indicates that the loctions were highly typical, with a mean rating
6.7 and a minimum of 6.0 on a 7-point scale.

-c-on-

sed

c- a& ofal.-e).-

chte

e--l

p--fys-tnm-may.”

nddctsirs,sederessr/-f

fact, the ratings were significantly higher for location items than for the instrument items tshowed robust priming, t2(50) = 4.76. Finally,we have replicated this experiment using same items but with a 150-ms presentationthe verb and a 50-ms mask. Although the inaction was nonsignificant, there was a relia21-ms priming effect for the instrumenF1(1,54) = 6.93, F2(1,48) = 4.04, and a nonsignificant 8-ms effect for the locations, F < 1,by subjects and items.

A second possible reason for the null effmay be that the role/filler typicality ratings do ncapture all information necessary to constructoptimal set of items for obtaining priming. Tnorms measured whether a location is commfor the situation described by the verb. Howethey provided no data concerning the range ocations at which a situation might reasonaoccur, nor about the rank of a location with spect to all other possible ones; rather, the pbilities were restricted to those included in norms. If a number of the situations describedthe verbs of Experiment 2 can occur in a wideriety of locations, and these locations are nomutually similar as may have been the case the agents, patients, and instruments, then a ber of the location roles may not be well definresulting in a lack of priming. For example, though the mean typicality rating fstrolled–parkwas 6.8 out of 7, there are numous dissimilar locations in which strolling coccur. Intuitively, this seems to be the case wthe location role in general; many situations occur in a wide range of locations.

One further possible cause for concern isunrelated control trials. Table 1 shows that mean decision latency for the unrelated lotions was shorter than for the unrelated insments (643 vs 671 ms). Interpreting this diffence is difficult because the location ainstrument targets were different words, and merous variables influence lexical decisiontencies. For example, the location targets ctained a significantly greater number of lettelocations, M = 7.0, SE= 0.3; instruments, M =5.4, SE= 0.4; t(50) = 3.38. However, they weralso marginally more frequent than the ins
Inment targets, as measured by log(frequency) ac-

,

n

enstireeersa

e r

n

eoc

ccathotn

readuitui8

rve

h,

aioeio

nstic

er,sdis-p-

toar-iv-c-

asn.

otbleutnts

rg5)n-ent are-outn-

n,dessid-best the

nincts in bsithin-the40 he

nheca-s, 6

-

528 FERRETTI, MCRAE

cording to Kucera and Francis (1967): locatioM = 1.26, SE= 0.14; instruments, M = 0.90, SE= 0.15; t(50) = 1.78, p < .09. It is also possiblthat the unrelated verb–location pairs were as unrelated as were the unrelated verb–inment pairs (or verb–agent or verb–patient paIt appears unlikely, however, that this influencthe results. An inspection of Appendix D makit clear that the probability of the situations dscribed by the verbs taking place at the unlated locations is quite low, though not imposble. To confirm this, we conducted additionrole/filler typicality norms identical to those dscribed above, except that each location andstrument was included with its unrelated veThe typicality ratings were extremely low adid not differ: locations, M = 1.5, SE = 0.1;instruments, M = 1.4, SE = 0.2; t2(50) = 0.57,p > .5. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that thunrelated verbs facilitated responses to the ltion targets.

In conclusion, the null location priming effemay be real; verbs may not prime typical lotions. This result might reflect the fact that location at which a situation takes place is nsalient part of its situation structure. Thus, oconclusion might be that location is less fquently encoded as part of an episode, so thverb describing that situation does not immeately evoke location information. This is curiobecause research on the organization of stions in memory has demonstrated otherw(Barsalou, 1988; Brown & Schopflocher, 199Lancaster & Barsalou, 1997). These obsetions may be reconciled, however, by considing that that the location of, for example, mmost recent argument with someone is higsalient and memorable, but at the same timelocations of all my arguments do not formstructured class because they occur in numous, dissimilar locations. Thus, locations mbe important for specific memories, but locatpriming from a verb will not occur unless thform a structured class for the type of situatdenoted by the verb.

Argument status. Experiment 2 may bear odiscussions concerning the argument statuspecific thematic roles. A number of diagnos
have been proposed to differentiate between
AND HATHERELL

s,

otru-s).ds-e-i-l

-in-b.d

a-

t-e ae-t ai-sa-

se;a-r-ylytheaer-ynyn

ofs

guments and adjuncts of verbs (Clifton, Spe& Abney, 1991; Speer & Clifton, 1998), or aSchütze and Gibson (1999) have framed the tinction, between arguments and modifiers. Aplying Schütze and Gibson’s six diagnosticsour stimuli, the instruments are classified as guments with respect to three of them (iteratity, separation from the head, and Wh-extration), whereas the locations are classifiedarguments only with respect to Wh-extractio(It can be noted that verbs such as put, for whicha location is specified obligatorily, were nused in Experiment 2.) Therefore, it is possithat priming was found for the instruments bnot the locations partly because the instrumeare more likely to be arguments.

MacDonald, Pearlmutter, and Seidenbe(1994) and Spivey-Knowlton and Sedivy (199have applied a different criterion for determiing the likelihood that a phrase is an argumversus an adjunct/modifier. They claim thatphrase is an argument if the verb’s lexical repsentation specifies semantic information abit. If priming is taken as evidence of the sematic information computed from a word, theunder these assumptions, Experiment 2 provievidence that instruments may best be conered as arguments, whereas locations are considered as adjuncts/modifiers, at least forverbs that we used.

Associative links in a spreading activationetwork. Word association norms were agaused to evaluate whether the priming effecould be accounted for by associative linksa spreading activation network. All of the verof Experiment 2 were normed together, w40 subjects participating. For 19 of the 26 strument items, 0 of 40 subjects produced instrument given the verb, whereas 1 of subjects produced the instrument for 6 of titems, and 2 produced spoon when givenstirred. The verb–location word-associationorming results were identical to those for tinstruments: 0 of 40 subjects produced the lotion given the verb for 19 of the 26 itemwhereas 1 of 40 produced the location foritems, and 2 produced bathroomwhen givenshowered. Therefore, it is unlikely that associa
ar-tive relatedness, at least as measured by word

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

association norms, was responsible for the

fosteii aba

d

tmter

ni

iex or

tu

f

ehe

dspar-ure

h

toreificr tohe?”e oneryer-inge-w-

rat-the

2.9

ted

eri-

nguch- asygetaw

on-ed

d ofs,ro-tion-

strument priming effects.

EXPERIMENT 3: SINGLE-WORD PRIMINGOF PATIENT FEATURES

McRae et al. (1997) suggested that the inmation associated with various thematic rolecomputed in the form of a featural-style protype. There are two ways in which this represtation might be computed on-line, correspondto abstractionist and exemplar-based theorAbstractionist theories such as that of PosnerKeele (1968) claim that experiencing a numof exemplars of a category results in the storof a prototype consisting of the modal or averafeatures. In contrast, exemplar models suchHintzman’s (1986) and models of superimposmemory such as Rumelhart and McClellan(1985) claim that individual instances are ladown in memory and abstraction occurs at time of recall. In either a prototype or an exeplar model, linguistic input such as an isolaverb results in the computation of a summastyle representation (see Hintzman, 1986, focompelling demonstration). Given these notioit makes sense to ask whether a verb might prindividual feature names of the type that subjeproduced in McRae et al.’s feature generattask. For example, when asked to “list the ftures of someone who is convicted,” appromately 50% of the subjects produced <guilty><is guilty>. Thus, Experiment 3 used a shSOA single-word priming task to test whetheverb such as convictingwould prime a typicalpatient feature such as <guilty> when the feawas presented linguistically as a single-wofeature name in the form of an adjective (guilty).Note that we refer to the adjectival targets as ture names because they were determinedasking subjects to rate them as characteris(i.e., features) of entities that tend to fill a spcific role. Furthermore, the feature names wof the same type that McRae et al. obtained wthey explicitly asked subjects to generate ftures for thematic roles, and this terminology hbeen used in numerous previous studies (Ro& Mervis, 1975; Tabossi, 1988).

The task parameters were identical to Expements 1 and 2. As in Experiment 2, subjects p


in-

r- iso-n-

nges.ndergege ased’sidhe-dy-r as,mectsona-i-orrt a

rerd

ea- byticse-reena-assch

formed lexical decisions to the target worbecause no semantic decision task was apent that could encompass the adjectival featnames.

Method

Subjects. Thirty subjects participated for casremuneration, fifteen per list.

Materials. A norming study was conducted determine the typicality of specific featunames with respect to the patient role of specverbs. Subjects were asked questions simila“How common is it for someone who has tfollowing characteristics to be manipulatedand were asked to rate each adjectival featura 7-point scale in which 1 corresponded to vuncommon and 7 to very common. As in Expiment 1b, we also normed the agent role, usquestions such as “How common is it for somone who manipulates others to have the folloing characteristics?” The mean patienthood ing for the 20 items chosen on the basis of norming results was 6.3 (range = 5.7–6.8),whereas their mean agenthood rating was (range= 1.1–6.5), t2(19) = 9.41. The verb–featurename combinations and their ratings are lisin Appendix E. Note that the ing form of theverb was used in this experiment, as in Expments 1a and 1b.

Two lists were constructed, each containi10 feature names paired with related verbs, sas tricking–gullible, and the remaining 10 feature names paired with unrelated verbs, suchhiring–upset. Unrelated pairs were formed bre-pairing the related items. Thus each tarserved as its own control, and no subject sany word more than once. Each list also ctained 100 filler trials composed of 10 relatverb–noun items (brewing–beer), 30 unrelatedtrials with noun targets (socializing–caribou),and 60 trials with nonword targets (shooting–nurrent). All nonwords were pronounceable anwere formed by changing one or two lettersan English word. Half of the targets were wordand half were nonwords. The relatedness pportion was 0.33 (20/60) and the nonword rawas 0.6. Finally, 20 practice trials were co
ri-er-structed that included 10 unrelated verb–nountrials and 10 verb–nonword trials.

,

T.azectn

tralui

e

teb

aitef tithn

em

onsn, 0ioiom ine

ctco

a-on- ofred one to

dyesheiveed

ng) ofd-

ip- he

u- he

d-

tedunats.3et-hereg-a-si-of

heat

hef

530 FERRETTI, MCRAE

Procedure. The apparatus and trial paramters were identical to Experiments 1 and 2. task was lexical decision, as in Experiment 2

Design. Lexical decision latencies and squroot of the number of errors were analyusing two-way analyses of variance. The faof interest was relatedness (related vs ulated), which was within subjects and items.

Results

Decision latencies. Response latencies greathan three standard deviations above the gmean were replaced by that upper-limit va(1% of the scores). Lexical decision latencfor feature names following related verbs (M =632 ms, SE= 16) were 33 ms shorter than whthey followed unrelated verbs (M = 665 ms,SE= 20), F1(1,28) = 8.24, F2(1,18) = 4.64.

Errors. There was not a reliable differenceerror rates for feature names following rela(M = 2.0%, SE= 0.7%) versus unrelated ver(M = 2.0%, SE= 1.0%), F1 < 1, F2 < 1.

Discussion

The results of Experiment 3 support the clthat the thematic role knowledge compufrom a verb can be viewed as the features oentities or objects that typically fill that themarole (McRae et al., 1997). Note that 2 of 20 items had agenthood ratings within the raof the patienthood ratings (hiring–qualifiedandinvestigating–suspicious). When these were rmoved, the priming effect remained at 33 F1(1,28) = 7.62, F2(1,16) = 3.83, p < .07.

Other researchers have used the metaphfeature activation to explain similar phenomein particular, expectations generated from a tence context. It is important here to differeate between implicit expectancy generationexemplified in the networks of Elman (199and explicit strategic expectancy generatas exemplified by Becker’s (1980) verificatmodel. Expectancy generation during norsentence interpretation corresponds to theplicit type. For example, Schwanenflugel aShoben (1985) had subjects make lexical dsions to words that were highly or less expecontinuations of sentence fragments. They
cluded that their results were best explained
AND HATHERELL

e-he

redorre-

ernde

es

n

ind

s

md

thecege

-s,

r ofa,

en-ti-as),n,nalm-dci-edn-

terms of the number and specificity of the fetures that were activated by the sentence ctexts. That is, they conceptualized the effectsentence context in terms of narrowing featuactivation. Similarly, Tabossi (1988) illustratethat a sentence context has a strong effectlexical ambiguity resolution if it promotes thcomputation of expectancies that correspondspecific features or sets of features.

These results also cohere nicely with a stuby McRae et al. (1997) showing that adjectivof the type used in Experiment 3 influence tresolution of the main clause/reduced relatclause temporary syntactic ambiguity. They usadjectives to bias the initial noun toward beieither a good agent (3a) or a good patient (3bthe initial verb, and found an influence on reaing times at the agent NP in the by-phrase (thedealer):

(3a) The shrewd heartless gambler manulated by the dealer had bid more money thancould afford to lose.

(3b) The young naive gambler maniplated by the dealer had bid more money thancould afford to lose.

McRae et al. attributed the slightly delayeeffect to the complexity of the required computations; determining thematic fit necessitacombining the two adjectives with the head noto interpret the initial NP, then combining thwith the verb’s syntactic and thematic propertie

There are two ways in which the Experimentresults might be explained using semantic nworks, although neither seem probable. First, tverbs might be directly connected to the featuin semantic memory or the adjective in phonoloical and orthographic memory. A word assocition experiment was conducted to test this posbility. Twenty-one subjects were read eachthe 20 verbs in theiring form and verbally pro-duced the first word that came to mind. Using t5% criterion, one item was associated in th3 of 21 subjects producedbadgivenpunishing.Furthermore, one subject producedguilty givenconvicting, and one producedinjury (rather thaninjured) given bandaging, whereas 0 of 21 pro-duced the target for the remaining 17 items. T28-ms priming effect was similar after removal o

inthe associated item,F1(1,28)= 4.56,F2(1,17)=

ao

e

)e

uatioo

h

t ofe

ticunn-e

ss- a

lenceveingr toer-a-

2,heirodntt in

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

3.34,p< .09. Therefore, it is unlikely that associtive relatedness as measured by the word asstion task influenced the results of Experiment 3

The second possibility is a form of mediatpriming. In Collins and Loftus’s (1975) modenodes representing entities and objects are linto nodes corresponding to their features. If amantic network incorporates “is a patient” linkthen activation will spread from a verb nodethe nodes representing the typical patient(sthe situations it denotes. Activation might thspread to nodes corresponding to the featurethe typical patients, resulting in patient–featpriming, akin to mediated priming (McNamar1992). This account does not seem viable for reasons. First, the “is a patient” links must exbut they do not in any current semantic netwmodel. Second, even if there were links frverbs to typical patients, and from typical ptients to their features, a number of researchave provided evidence that mediated priming
any form does not exist (Livesay & Burges
imEoiirt im-

m. aet

8 ini-pe

er-andmg.nt

condition (5) signals an impending patient at

1998; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992).

EXPERIMENT 4: CONJOINT EFFECTS OFSITUATION KNOWLEDGE AND SYNTAX

Experiments 1 and 3 showed that verbs prtheir typical agents and patients. The goal of periment 4 was to provide evidence that frthe perspective of on-line sentence processthis verb-specific information should be consered as part of thematic role knowledge. Vewere embedded in simple sentence fragmentest whether the knowledge they tap is used
mediately to generate expectations for possi
sented visually. The subjects’ task was to read the noun t


-cia-.d

l,kedse-s,to inn

s ofre,

wost,rkma-ers ofs,

ex-mng,d-bss to

impending roles, and hence is a key aspecthematic assignment. If situation knowledgtapped by verbs interacts quickly with syntaccues, then priming should obtain when a nooccurs in its congruent role, but not its incogruent role. Conversely, if situation knowledgis activated independently of syntactic proceing, then priming should be found whenevertypical agent or patient closely follows a verb.

In Experiment 4, the impending thematic rowas cued using an active or passive sentefragment containing a semantically uninformatisubject such as a pronoun or “the woman.” Ussentence-initial nouns and pronouns that refelarge classes of individuals enabled us to be ctain that obtained effects were due to the informtion provided by the verb. As illustrated in Tableagents and patients were presented in both tcongruent role (good agent in agent role (1) gopatient in patient role (5)) and their incongruerole (good agent in patient role (3), good patienagent role (7)) in a cross-modal naming paradigIn the unrelated control trials, a target followedfragment containing a verb for which the targwas a plausible agent or patient (2, 4, 6, and Table 2). This method of forming control condtions is standard in experiments of this ty(Duffy et al., 1989; Morris, 1994).

Predictions were generated as follows. Expiment 4 used transitive verbs, so both agent patient information should be activated frothem and potentially be available for priminThe syntactic structure of the active congrue

blethe, so that verb-specific situation knowledge

cop.

crook.

was pre-

TABLE 2

The Eight Conditions of Experiment 4

Related verb Unrelated verb

Good agentsCongruent role (1) She was arrested by the / cop. (2) She was kissed by the /Incongruent role (3) She arrested the / cop. (4) She kissed the / cop.

Good patientsCongruent role (5) She arrested the / crook. (6) She kissed the / crook.Incongruent role (7) She was arrested by the / crook. (8) She was kissed by the /

Note.The sentence fragment preceding the back-slash was presented auditorily, and the noun target following it
arget aloud.

,

civthho

bie

oo

aatnt

u

vto

fiut

t

bein

ane

hitiv-

avetac-re- se- &tedingngu-inghaave toticn

ing didor-msge

ye-di-

isticle

aticedto

in-to

en-isetse-ionsncybe

hatri-

sas-le.t 4

ingnt,ted

conditions would be due to the match between

532 FERRETTI, MCRAE

should interact with the structure to produpriming for good patients. Similarly, the passstructure signals an impending agent, so situation knowledge should combine with tstructural cues to produce priming for goagents in (1). Note that neither structure is fuconstraining. Although the Experiment 4 verhave a strong tendency to be used with a patan active fragment could continue with an ajective, rather than having a noun directly flow the. A passive fragment could continue, fexample, with a locative phrase, as in “She warrested by the warehouse,” a temporal phras in “She was arrested by the time her husbreturned,” or a manner, as in “She was taughthe book.” However, most temporal and mancontinuations were rendered impossible by postverbal the.

Now consider the cases in which the noconcept is incongruent with the fragment’s cofigurational information (3 and 7). For the actifragment (3), by the time the verb is heard, agent role has been filled by the subject pronor semantically general NP, which we hypothsize will dampen activation of the verb-specisituation knowledge regarding the agent. Thno priming should be found for a good agenthe patient role, even though priming was foufor good agents in Experiment 1a. (Note thaof the 16 verb–agent pairs were included in Eperiment 1a, and they showed a priming effeF2(1,6) = 6.35.) Likewise, because the patierole is filled by the subject of the passive frament in (7), its activation should be dampenand no priming should result even thoughwas found in Experiment 1b. (All 16 of the verpatient pairs from Experiment 4 were includin Experiment 1b, and they showed a primeffect, F2(1,14) = 5.24.)

Cross-modal naming was used. We consered a cross-modal animacy-decision task, pilot subjects reported that making an animadecision following a sentence fragment wstrange and difficult. Note that subjects do report that an animacy (or other semantic) dsion is strange in the context of single-wopriming experiments. Previous research obtained mixed results concerning the sens
ity of the naming task to semantic informatio
AND HATHERELL

eeated

llysnt,

d-l-rasse,nd

byerhe

nn-eheune-cs,innd 8x-ct,ntg-edit–dg

id-butcysotci-rdas

in sentences. A number of experiments hdemonstrated that naming is sensitive to syntic violations (e.g., when a noun target is psented when a verb is expected) but not tomantic violations (O’Seaghdha, 1997; WestStanovich, 1986). Boland (1993) investigathematic violations using cross-modal namand lexical decision and found that violatithe animacy selectional restriction did not inflence the time required to name the violatnoun. However, Duffy et al. (1989), O’Seaghd(1997), and Stanovich and West (1983) hshown that cross-modal naming is sensitivethe facilitative effects of syntactic and semaninformation. Although Duffy et al. favored aaccount that emphasized intralexical primrather than sentence-level effects, their datanot adequately support this conclusion and Mris (1994) subsequently reinterpreted it in terof the interaction between situation knowledand syntactic cues. Furthermore, Morris’ etracking extensions of Duffy et al. provide adtional evidence for her interpretation.

We took advantage of the fact that namingsensitive to the facilitative influence of semanfit to investigate how verb-specific thematic roknowledge and syntactic cues interact in themprocessing. Various researchers have claimthat cross-modal naming is less susceptibleintegrative processing because it does notvolve a decision, and subjects need merelycompute and execute a pronunciation (Seidberg et al., 1984; Stanovich & West, 1983). This important because the Experiment 4 targprovide a continuation of the auditorally prsented sentence fragments, and our predictrest on schematic/syntactic conjoint expectaeffects, rather than integration effects. It cannoted, however, that even if it were argued tintegration might influence naming in Expement 4, this would be consistent with our claimbecause integration would take the form ofsigning the noun to its appropriate thematic roFurthermore, because all verbs in Experimenallowed animate agents and patients, if primeffects are due in part to thematic assignmedifferences between the related and unrela

nthe noun concept and the verb’s thematic role

rs

e

eyoo

,t

h

nyitr

sa

n

fi

a

n

c

tt-hbn

e

nt-

tedre-ory

ed

ag-eche

itedent. ofrd

on-tedw-chereheof

d

-ver

tsleors. in

edlsondu-od

alf

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

concepts. In other words, claiming that integtive processing influenced priming in this cais equivalent to claiming that priming was influenced by thematic assignment, a procthat hinges on the immediate computation ause of verb-specific thematic role conceptuknowledge.

Finally, Experiment 4 differs from much of thprevious research in this domain in a few waFirst, we focused on a thematic manipulatirather than a less-specified manipulation of ctextual constraint. Second, sentence contexts wstripped down to include only the content verbpronoun or semantically general subject, andpresence versus absence ofwasandby surround-ing the verb (see Vu et al., 1998, for a study of tinfluence of minimal sentence contexts like theon lexical ambiguity resolution). Finally, unlike imost experiments of this type, there were no stactic or semantic anomalies present in the stuli. Although agents and patients were presenin their incongruent thematic role, items wechosen so that these sentences made senseexample, cops sometimes get arrested anddents do grade other people (teaching assistbeing salient examples). In addition, all sentenfragments containing unrelated verbs made seFinally, because no sentences contained animviolations, any effects were due to thematicThese aspects of Experiment 4 combine to crea relatively subtle manipulation, providingstrong test of the hypotheses.

In summary, it was predicted that if situatiospecific information regarding common paticipants is activated from verbs and interaquickly with syntactic cues, then priming shoube found for typical agents and patients in thcongruent but not their incongruent roles.

Method

Subjects. One hundred and twelve subjecparticipated for course credit, fourteen per lis

Materials. Sixteen verbs, each paired wiboth a good agent (cop–arrested) and a good patient (crook–arrested) were chosen based on tnorms of McRae et al. (1997) that are descriin Experiment 1 above. The agenthood ratifor the 16 verb–agent pairs were high (M = 6.6,
range= 6.1–6.9) and did not overlap with the

a-e-ssndal

s.nn-ereahe

ese

n-m-ede. Fortu-ntscese.acyt.ate

-r-ts

ldeir

ts.h

eedgs

patienthood ratings (M = 2.4, range= 1.4–3.9),t2(15) = 23.51. The patienthood ratings for th16 verb–patient pairs were high (M = 6.5, range= 5.6–7.0) and did not overlap with their agehood ratings (M = 1.9, range= 1.3–3.8), t2(15) =25.69. The items and their ratings are presenin Appendix F. Each of the 16 verbs were psented in their past-tense form in an auditsentence fragment that began with She, He, It,The man, The woman, or The guy. It was usedfor only one item, “It was slaughtered/devourby the butcher.”

The first author recorded the sentence frments using SoundEdit software. The spefiles were recorded digitally via a microphonattached to a Macintosh LC 630, and then edso that they ended immediately following thoffset of the final word in the sentence fragmeThis procedure enabled visual presentationthe target precisely at the offset of the final woof the auditory fragment.

Example sentences for each of the eight cditions are presented in Table 2. The unrelatrials were formed by presenting a target folloing a fragment that contained a verb for whithe target was a plausible agent or patient. Thwas a different unrelated verb for each of t16 target verbs. With respect to number phonemes, the related verbs (M = 6.6, SE= 0.6,range= 3–12) did not differ from the unrelateverbs (M = 6.1, SE= 0.5, range= 4–9), t2(15) =0.63, p > .5. In addition, log(frequency) according to Kucera and Francis (1967) summed othe base, s, ed, and ing forms of the verb, wassimilar for the related (M = 1.79, SE = 0.11,range = 1.15–2.65) and unrelated verbs (M =1.73, SE = 0.15, range = 0.48–3.02), t2(15) =0.34, p > .7.

Eight lists were formed. Repetition of targewithin lists was avoided by treating both roand congruency as between-subjects factThus, Lists 1 and 2 contained good agentstheir congruent (agent) role, half with relatand half with unrelated verbs. Lists 3 and 4 acontained good agents, half with related ahalf with unrelated verbs, but in their incongrent (patient) role. Lists 5 and 6 contained gopatients in their congruent (patient) role, h

irwith related and half with unrelated verbs.

,

pte

w8 ae p opione tdpoiadr

pr rgiv taer

roicigr

rgig

tar-eenncy the theby agetstionounub- or

in-any ay toenbout

repen-bles vsted),nt).eenithin

erefor and

re-rors

534 FERRETTI, MCRAE

Finally, Lists 7 and 8 also contained good tients, half with related and half with unrelaverbs, but in their incongruent (agent) role.

So that every subject was presented 8 congruent related, 8 congruent unrelated, congruent related, and 8 incongruent unreltrials, filler trials were constructed to complthe cells not occupied by the good agent ortient target stimuli. For example, the stimuliinterest in Lists 1 and 2 were good agents sented in their congruent role in conjunctwith related and unrelated verbs. To balathem, 16 incongruent filler trials were includdivided into 8 containing an agent related toverb presented in the patient role, and an ational 8 containing a sensible verb–agent with the agent presented in the patient rEach list also contained 56 unrelated filler trof various syntactic constructions that rangelength from 4 to 12 words. Thus, over the couof the experiment, subjects named visually sented noun targets that occurred in varioussitions in the sentence. The location of the tanoun should not have been predictable gthat, across the experimental and filler trials,gets followed adjectives, verbs, determinand pronouns. The proportion of targets psented with related verbs in their congruent was 0.2 (16/80) in each list. Twenty practitems were also created using the same des

Procedure. The sentence fragments were psented auditorally over headphones, and tawere presented visually on a Macintosh usPsyScope (Cohen et al., 1993). Each trial be
with a 200-ms tone to signal the presentation
aSignificant by subjects and items.

AND HATHERELL

a-d

ithin-tedtea-fre-nced,hedi-airle.ls insee-po-et

enr-

rs,e-leen.e-ets

ngan

final word triggered the presentation of the get, which remained in the middle of the scruntil the subject named it aloud. Naming latewas measured with millisecond accuracy astime between the onset of the target andonset of the naming response as recorded microphone and CMU button box. The tarwas then replaced by a comprehension que(on every trial, the fragment plus the target nformed a sensible grammatical sentence). Sjects responded by pressing either the YESNO button on the button box. The intertrial terval was 2 s. The experimenter recorded trials on which the subject mispronouncedword, extraneous noise caused the voice ketrigger, or the voice key failed to trigger whthe word was named. Each session lasted a30 min and included three breaks.

Design. Four-way analyses of variance weconducted using naming latency as the dedent variable. The three independent variaof interest were thematic role (good agentgood patient), relatedness (related vs unrelaand congruency (congruent vs incongrueThematic role and congruency were betwsubjects and within items. Relatedness was wsubjects and items. Planned comparisons wconducted to investigate priming effects good agents and patients in their congruentincongruent roles.

Results

Mean naming latencies by condition are psented in Table 3. Because pronunciation er

ofoccurred on only 2% of the trials, they were notls

55

the auditory sentence fragment. The offset of thefurther analyzed. In addition, 1% of the tria

TABLE 3

Mean Cross-Modal Naming Latencies (ms) for Experiment 4

Congruent Incongruent

Agent Patient Agent Patient

Relatedness M SE M SE M SE M SE

Unrelated 571 14 608 15 594 17 576 1Related 545 13 588 13 593 19 571 1Facilitation 26a 20a 1 5

AN

seredd

tf

fu

painat

thth

nw

etinted

e-e

eddte

re-

btateinlhaoo

ed.e-ctsts,ivew-oft

ngam-ntse-edre

nts

nse

reheeyu-te

bleingc-

odleol-

sdn

usen-

ss-

msnss

r

VERBS, SCHEMAS,

were discarded because of extraneous noifailure to trigger the microphone. Finally, sponse latencies greater than three standarviations above the grand mean were replacethat upper-limit value (1% of the scores).

The planned comparisons testing the cenpredictions showed that naming latencies good agents in the agent role were shorterlowing fragments containing related versus related verbs, F1(1,104) = 10.57, F2(1,14) =5.14. Likewise, naming latencies for good tients in the patient role were shorter followfragments containing related versus unrelverbs, F1(1,104) = 6.26, F2(1,14) = 5.67. In con-trast, there were no priming effects when eigood agents or patients were presented in incongruent roles, all F’s < 1.

Collapsing across good agents and patiethe congruency by relatedness interaction significant by subjects, F1(1,104) = 6.17, andmarginal by items, F2(1,14) = 2.23, p > .1. Inline with this marginal interaction, when targwere presented in their congruent role, namlatencies were 22 ms shorter following rela(M = 567 ms, SE = 10 ms) versus unrelateverbs (M = 589 ms, SE= 10 ms), F1(1,104) =15.14, F2(1,14) = 6.92. In contrast, when prsented in their incongruent role, naming latcies only 3 ms shorter for related (M = 582 ms,SE= 12 ms) versus unrelated noun targets (M =585 ms, SE= 11 ms), F < 1 in both analyses.

Congruency and thematic role interactF1(1,104) = 4.03, F2(1,14) = 29.86. Collapseacross relatedness, subjects were 35 ms fasname agents in their congruent role (M = 558 ms,SE= 10 ms) than in their incongruent role (M =593 ms,SE = 13 ms), whereas subjects we24 ms slower to name patients in their congrurole (M = 598 ms,SE= 10 ms) than in their incongruent role (M = 574 ms,SE= 11 ms). Notethat the congruency factor is misleading herecause there is no congruency distinction forgets following fragments containing unrelaverbs. Thus, the best way to think about thisteraction is that subjects were faster overalname targets that followed passive rather tactive constructions. This was expected for g
agents following related verbs, but not for any othe other conditions. There appear to be thre

or- de- by

ralorol-n-

-ged

ereir

ts,as

sgd

n-

,

r to

ent

e-r-d-

tondf

possible reasons that this might have occurrFirst, congruency and thematic role were btween-subjects factors, so that some subjenamed targets following passive fragmenwhereas others named targets following actfragments (although they named nouns folloing the opposite structure in an equal numberfiller items). Therefore, one possibility is thathe subjects who named good patients followipassive fragments happened to be faster at ning words than those who named good patiefollowing active fragments. Analyses of thfiller items included in the relevant lists provided evidence for this. The subjects who namgood patients following passive fragments we16 ms faster on those filler items (M = 557 ms)than were the subjects who named good patiefollowing active fragments (M = 573 ms). A sec-ond possibility is that naming the target noufollowing passive fragments was easier becauthe subject had just heard “by the,” which atwo short, high-frequency words, whereas in tactive fragment case, only “the” follows thverb. A third possible source of this effect mabe the length of the fragment; the longer the aditory fragment, the more likely it is that a targewill appear. In summary, it is possible that somor all of these factors may have been responsifor the three unexpected cases of shorter namlatencies for targets following passive versus ative fragments: the 23-ms advantage for goagents following unrelated verbs (2 vs 4 in Tab2); the 32-ms advantage for good patients flowing unrelated verbs (8 vs 6); and the 17-madvantage for good patients following relateverbs (7 vs 5). Finally, note that this interactiodoes not compromise the experiment becathe critical results concern the pattern of withisubjects relatedness effects.

Thematic role, congruency, and relatednedid not interact, F < 1 in both analyses. Thematic role and relatedness did not interact; F < 1in both analyses. Naming latencies were 13 shorter for related verb–noun combinatio(M = 574 ms, SE= 8 ms) than for unrelated one(M = 587 ms, SE = 8 ms), F1(1,104) = 10.23,F2(1,14) = 6.54. Naming latencies did not diffefor good agents (M = 576 ms, SE= 8 ms) versus
egood patients (M = 586 ms, SE= 7 ms); F < 1 in

,

psrsce tle

b tg8le

oe

mhsoae

anro oigt

b

a

hveett

he

er-singver,a-

tingen-

s re-licithe-

ithid as

e.

al-uchips.irrb.a-or

ar-use

elyng onc)

. /

lereasre-aticce,

hausbyarl- ap-uirele

ent-hen-

536 FERRETTI, MCRAE

both analyses. Congruent (M = 578 ms, SE =7 ms) and incongruent naming latencies (M =583 ms, SE = 8 ms) did not differ; F1 < 1,F2(1,14) = 1.43, p > .2.

Discussion

Priming was found for good agents and tients when they appeared in an appropriate tactic environment, but not when they appeain their atypical thematic role. In other wordExperiment 4 showed immediate conjoint effeof detailed situation-specific knowledge tappby verbs and syntactic cues that modulatedprobability of impending role fillers. Thus, for aintents and purposes of on-line sentence procing, the situation-specific knowledge tappedverbs is best considered as a component ofmatic role knowledge. This conclusion is a local extension of Carlson and Tanenhaus’ (19and Fillmore’s (1968) claims that thematic roenable close syntactic–semantic interplay.

Experiment 4 is consistent with a numberexperiments investigating the constraints undlying the resolution of temporary syntactic abiguities. A number of studies have shown tthematic fit influences syntactic ambiguity relution in the absence of semantic anom(Pearlmutter & MacDonald, 1992; Schmaud& Egan, 1998). For example, Schmauder Egan found that thematic fit and syntactic pcessing interact quickly during the resolutionthe direct object/sentence complement ambity, using sentences such as (4a) and (4b) manipulated thematic fit of the noun (robberyvsquarrel) as a patient/theme:

(4a) The suspect admitted [that] the robery was not a good idea.

(4b) The suspect admitted [that] the qurel was not a good idea.

Experiment 4 appears inconsistent with otstudies such as Ferreira, Stacey, and Re(1998) who had subjects listen to passive stences such as (5) that described an evenwhich the typical roles of entities or objecwere reversed:

(5) The dog was bitten by the man.The subject’s task was to identify explicitly t
agent or patient. Because subjects often misidtified the agent, Ferreira et al. concluded that t
AND HATHERELL

a-yn-ed,tsdhelss-y

he-i-8)s

fr--at-

lyrd-fu-hat

-

r-

ertten- ins

agent role in a full passive is syntactically vulnable, and that comprehenders’ on-line procesof passives goes awry in many cases. Howewe found priming for good agents but not ptients following passive constructions, suggesthat passives do consistently focus comprehders on the agent role, and that Ferreira et al.’sults may have been due to the off-line expdecision regarding who or what filled each tmatic role.

Experiment 4 also appears inconsistent wDuffy et al. (1989) and Morris (1994), who dnot obtain facilitative effects for nouns suchmustachein (6a) and dialect in (6b):

(6a) The woman trimmed the / mustach(6b) The people knew the / dialect.

The apparent discrepancy arises becausethough (6a) mirrors our items, sentences sas (6b) had weaker verb–patient relationshIn addition, Duffy et al.’s targets varied in thesemantic and syntactic relationship to the veAlthough their targets were predominantly ptients following verbs, as in (6a) and (6b), agents presented in postverbal by-phrases, theyalso included locations and instruments in vious postverbal prepositional phrases. Becaa number of each type of item were relativweakly related to the verb, it is not surprisithat priming in their experiments dependedfurther constraining the situation, as in (6and (6d):

(6c) The barber trimmed the / mustache(6d) The sun was totally hidden by the

eclipse.In our account of Experiment 4, filling a ro

dampens the activation of a role concept, wheactivation persists for a thematic role that mains open. The notion of an open themrole, one that is not filled in a clause or sentenhas been described by Carlson and Tanen(1988) and tied to inferential processing Mauner, Tanenhaus, and Carlson (1995). Cson and Tanenhaus describe open roles aspearing in the discourse as variables that reqidentification or elaboration. A salient exampof an open role is that of the agent in an agless passive. To demonstrate that compre

en-heders treat an open thematic role as being filledby an unspecified entity, Mauner et al. showed

n

u

ve

aeoh

tn

xe

p

,t

a-t ofer,

ed aton-nd

tapingts,o-m-ex-

ac--e.he-angn,

invero-

ofthenalc-e-wot a

ngre-andalldas1)to-

VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

that agentless passives such as (7a) are easinterpret than similar intransitive constructiothat do not imply an agent, such as (7b):

(7a) The ship was sunk to collect the insance money.

(7b) The ship sunk to collect the insuranmoney.Mauner et al. concluded that an implicit argment was encoded as part of the interpretaof the agentless passive, but not when the was used intransitively. They further claimthat the semantic content of an implicit argment is determined by properties of the verb the amount of constraint provided by contand world knowledge. It is easy to envision hthematic role conceptual knowledge fits into tscheme in that the degree to which a themrole concept is well defined depends on theteraction among these factors and is imporfor determining the coherence of the semacontent of an implicit argument.

The pattern of priming effects found in Eperiment 4 implicates a structured view of geralized situation memory in which agent apatient information is differentiated in a mannsuch that syntactic cues can rapidly influenceactivation. This type of organization is intrinsto schematic representations of verbs and gealized situation structure. In contrast, a spreing activation account based on undifferentialinks predicts priming for good agents and tients in both their congruent and their incogruent roles. To account for the results, this tory must be augmented with a process thacapable of dampening activation of, and thdifferentiating between, typical fillers of thappropriate and inappropriate roles. Thusagent and patient links were incorporated inspreading activation network such as thatGentner (1975) and Rumelhart and Levin (197
then the obtained pattern of priming would
n

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hen.hatnt

farse-

predicted.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Episodic knowledge regarding common typof situations is important for numerous cogtive processes. The goal of this article was towhether reading or hearing a verb results in
immediate computation of situation-specifi

ier tos

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knowledge regarding the typical agents, ptients, instruments, and locations that are parthe generalized situations it denotes, and furthwhether this information should be consideras a component of thematic role knowledge,least from the perspective of verb usage and line language processing. Experiments 1 a2 showed that verbs presented in isolation their associated situation schemas, thus primtheir typical agents, patients, and instrumenbut apparently not locations. Experiment 3 prvided evidence that the representations coputed on-line from this schematic knowledgcan be viewed as a featural-style prototype. Eperiment 4 illustrated that schematic and synttic information interact quickly to focus comprehenders on the relevant role knowledgThus, these results demand an account of tmatic role knowledge that includes more thselectional restrictions and generalized linkinrules (i.e., more than, for example, GropePinker, Hollander, & Goldberg, 1991).

There is a logical lineage in the manner which thematic roles have been considered othe years. Chomsky (1965) incorporated the ntion of general selectional restrictions as partthe grammar. Katz and Fodor (1964) used same basic notions but considered selectiorestrictions as part of lexical semantics. Both acounts incorporated a rather limited set of thmatic roles and selectional features. Then tmoves occurred. First, it became apparent tharich set of thematic roles was required, leadito an ever-expanding taxonomy. Second, searchers such as Johnson-Laird (1983) McCawley (1968) pointed out that selectionrestrictions must make reference to worknowledge and that some of this knowledge wverb-specific. In response to this, Dowty (199proposed notions such as proto-agent and propatient features. This is an improvement bcause the combinatorics generate a larger nuber of possible thematic roles, and it avoids tnecessity of definitional or binary classificatioWhat our research suggests, however, is tthese proposals, although capturing importageneral facts that cut across verbs, do not goenough. A larger and more detailed set of
cmantic features may be necessary to capture the

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538 FERRETTI, MCRAE

empirical facts of language comprehension production. Thus, the framework created Dowty and others may work as a first appromation, but ultimately a framework is needthat can account for the semantic content overb’s thematic roles.

We focused on verbs that have well-definthematic roles to illustrate our points and mamize the probability of obtaining results inclean and systematic fashion. Because noverbs possess well-defined role concepts, onejection might be that our theory applies to onlsubset of verbs. We respond to this objectionappealing to the flexibility and context-dependnature of expectancy generation in sentence inpretation. Verbs with relatively poorly definethematic role concepts can act like verbs wwell-defined roles if at least one role is fill(Morris, 1994; Vu et al., 1998). This is consistwith Schwanenflugel and Shoben’s (1985) count regarding how sentence context constrfeature activation for upcoming words. Takingexample from Duffy et al. (1989) and Morr(1994), filling the agent role of findwith prospec-tor, as in “The prospector found the,” constrafeature activation for the upcoming patient.

Spreading Activation

We used word association norms to evaluan account of the data based on associative in a spreading activation network. Numerotypes of relations are tapped by word assotion norms (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). However, one bias evident in this task is that subjtend to produce responses from the same mcategory as the stimulus (e.g., a noun givenoun). Therefore, although removing assotively related items using single-response wassociation norms is the most typical methodthe semantic priming literature, this methdoes not definitively rule out an associative latedness semantic network account. Two thshould be noted, however. First, there is scevidence for association or co-occurrence bapriming in the absence of some semantic rtion. Other than McKoon and Ratcliff (1992studies investigating priming based on assotive relatedness have used items such as king–
queenand cow–milk, and thus have confounde
, AND HATHERELL

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associative and semantic relatedness. ThompSchill, Kurtz, and Gabrieli (1998) recentclaimed that priming due strictly to associatrelatedness does not occur, although further dence appears to be warranted. Second, cuspreading activation networks do not inclumechanisms that can account for the primingfects in our experiments. Although additionpost hoc assumptions could be incorporateappears that the additional mechanisms nesary to account for the priming of agents, tients, and instruments, the lack of priming agents and patients in incongruent roles, andsyntactic ambiguity experiments of McRae et(1998), Pearlmutter and MacDonald (1992), aSchmauder and Egan (1998) would makespreading activation account indistinguishafrom a schema account.

Part of Verb Meaning?

One intriguing speculation is that situatiobased thematic role concepts should be conered as part of verb meaning. This move is without precedent. Garrod and Sanford (19showed that sentence reading time for (8c) not differ depending on whether it was preceby a context sentence in which the instrum(or patient/theme in some other items, esmoke–cigarette) was explicitly presented (8aversus when it was implied by the verb (8b):

(8a) Keith was giving a lecture in LondoHe was taking his car there overnight.

(8b) Keith was giving a lecture in LondoHe was driving there overnight.

(8c) The car had recently been overhauThey concluded that the implied objects w“part of the meaning of the verb.” LikewisJackendoff (1990), Nagy and Gentner (199and Talmy (1975) have claimed that instruminformation is incorporated into the meaninga number of English verbs.

Thematic role concepts are intertwined wthe meaning of verbs. Intuitively, it seems ipossible to conceptualize the type of situatthat a verb denotes in the absence of participaFor example, it is impossible to conceptualor visualize a situation in which entertainingis occurring unless there is an entity doing

dentertaining, and at least one other entity that is

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VERBS, SCHEMAS, A

being entertained. Furthermore, the sense verb often is determined by the nouns that various thematic roles. Consider a verb suchcharge. The sense of chargecan be manipulateeasily and clearly by varying the agent, as“The K-mart shopper charged . . .” versus “Tbull charged . . .” versus “The judge charged. .Varying the patient can also change a vesense, as in “The clothing was charged” ver“The fortress was charged” versus “The crimnal was charged.” These observations are relto Gentner and France’s (1988) notions ccerning the relative malleability of verb versnoun meaning. Gentner and France pointedthat the meaning of the verb tends to changecluding the possibility that it becomes mephorical, rather than the noun’s meaning, suggest-ing that verb meaning is more dependent onmeaning of the nouns that fill its thematic rothan vice versa. In summary, if a verb’s meanis strongly influenced by, and intertwined witthe noun concepts that fill its thematic rolperhaps it makes sense to view thematic concepts as part of the meaning of a verb.

Thematic Role Concepts and LanguageDevelopment

There is an ongoing tension between linguiand psycholinguists rooted in the fact that tmajority of linguists focus on uncovering rule
and representations that are as general as poble, whereas many psycholinguists focus on thmore specific, detailed types of knowledge thare critical for language use. This tension arisin the present case in terms of reconciling thmatic roles as verb-specific concepts with geeral notions of thematic roles such as agenpatient, and instrument. McRae et al. (1997connected the specific and general aspectsthematic roles by drawing an analogy to conce

f allas

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tual hierarchies of nouns (Collins & Quillian1969). They claimed that general thematic rosuch as agent should be viewed as superordirole concepts, with verb-specific role concepas the basic level. One characteristic of baslevel concepts is that children learn them firand only later learn superordinate conce(Rosch et al., 1976). In a diary study of velearning, Tomasello (1992) found that the vamajority of his daughter’s early multiword utteances centered on specific verbs or predicterms. Tomasello called this the “Verb Island Hpothesis” because each verb acted as an islanorganization in an otherwise relatively chaolanguage system. The lexically specific patteof this phase of language development showitself both in the thematic roles of individuaverbs and in the manner in which they were sytactically marked across verbs. Thus, during odevelopmental period, some verbs were useonly a single simple sentence frame (e.g., “C___”), whereas others were used in multipslightly more complex frames (e.g., “Draw ___“Draw ___ on ___,” “Draw ___ for ___,” “___draw on ___”). Tomasello accounted for thedifferences by hypothesizing that for some situtions, the child had been exposed to compsentences involving a verb and multiple partipant types, whereas for others, the child eitwas not exposed to, or did not attend to, comp
ssi-e
atese-n-t,)of

p-

speech regarding them. He concluded that chil-dren do not possess general role concepts such asagent, patient, instrument, and location, but in-stead internalize situation- or verb-specific(basic-level) categories such asthing to drawwith andperson kissed. Thus, our research com-bines with that of Tomasello to illustrate thatverb-specific thematic role concepts are an im-portant component of on-line language compre-hension and production throughout the life span.

540 FERRETTI, MCRAE, AND HATHERELL

Verbs

APPENDIX A

Experiment 1a Verb–Agent Pairs with Their Agenthood (Ahood) and Patienthood (Phood) Ratings and Unrelated

Related verb Agent Ahood Phood Unrelated verb

entertaining comedian 6.9 2.7 sentencingshooting assassin 6.9 2.2 scrubbingsentencing judge 6.9 1.3 entertainingscrubbing janitor 6.8 1.4 cheeringaccusing prosecutor 6.8 2.6 visitingcuring doctor 6.8 3.8 terrorizinginterviewing reporter 6.8 2.7 payingvisiting tourist 6.8 1.4 accusingwriting author 6.7 1.8 punishingarresting cop 6.7 1.6 curingcheering spectator 6.7 1.3 torturinggoverning president 6.7 2.7 writinghiring boss 6.7 2.9 stealinginstructing coach 6.7 2.7 shootingdisobeying brat 6.7 3.1 studyingserving butler 6.7 2.1 capturingstealing criminal 6.7 1.4 hiringstudying scientist 6.6 2.4 servingtorturing rapist 6.6 2.2 invitingconvicting juror 6.6 1.3 firinginviting host 6.5 2.2 slaughteringpaying customer 6.5 1.6 governingsketching artist 6.5 2.5 disobeyingterrorizing pirates 6.5 2.2 interviewingpunishing parent 6.5 1.5 arrestingcapturing policeman 6.4 2.1 sketchingslaughtering butcher 6.2 1.4 instructingfiring employer 6.1 2.4 convicting

d Verbs

rb

APPENDIX B

Experiment 1b Verb–Patient Pairs with Their Agenthood (Ahood) and Patienthood (Phood) Ratings and Unrelate

Related verb Patient Ahood Phood Unrelated ve

accusing defendant 3.6 6.8 gradingadopting baby 1.4 6.4 investigatingarresting crook 1.2 5.9 servingconvicting criminal 1.4 5.9 entertainingcuring patient 1.4 6.1 recognizingentertaining audience 1.7 6.7 torturingfiring employee 1.9 6.4 shootinggrading student 2.4 6.8 convictinginterviewing applicant 1.6 6.6 curinginvestigating suspect 2.4 6.4 adoptinginviting guest 1.9 6.4 arrestingquestioning witness 2.0 6.7 slaughteringrecognizing celebrity 3.8 6.8 teachingserving customer 1.5 7.0 interviewingshooting deer 1.0 6.4 accusingslaughtering pig 1.0 6.8 questioningteaching trainee 1.6 6.3 invitingtorturing slave 1.3 5.6 firing

541
VERBS, SCHEMAS, AND THEMATIC ROLES
APPENDIX C

Experiment 2 Instruments with Their Ratings and Unrelated Verbs

Related verb Instrument Rating Unrelated verb

stirred spoon 6.9 shot
slapped hand 6.8 devouredpainted brush 6.8 taughtdusted rag 6.8 cutheated furnace 6.7 watchedate fork 6.7 hithunted rifle 6.7 trawledrepaired hammer 6.7 trackeddrank cup 6.6 slappedshot pistol 6.5 stirredfished bait 6.4 paintedwashed detergent 6.3 revivedtaught textbook 6.2 washedgambled dice 6.2 vandalizedwatched binoculars 6.1 heatedrevived oxygen 6.0 repairedvandalized paint 6.0 wrappedstabbed dagger 5.9 floatedcut saw 5.9 dustedhit bat 5.9 servedwrapped tinfoil 5.9 betinflated pump 5.8 dugserved platter 5.8 sketcheddrew marker 5.8 drankfloated canoe 5.8 stabbeddug spade 5.6 inflated

542
FERRETTI, MCRAE, AND HATHERELL
APPENDIX D

Experiment 2 Locations with Their Ratings and Unrelated Verbs

Related verb Location Rating Unrelated verb

cooked kitchen 7.0 worshippedexercised gymnasium 7.0 mourneddrove highway 7.0 preachedskated arena 7.0 prayedslept bedroom 7.0 browseddanced ballroom 7.0 examinedate restaurant 7.0 slepthunted forest 6.9 studiedacted theater 6.9 buriedstudied library 6.9 skatedshowered bathroom 6.9 sketchedgambled racetrack 6.8 swamprayed temple 6.8 drovemourned cemetery 6.8 actedexamined laboratory 6.8 devouredstrolled park 6.8 confessedpreached synagogue 6.7 exercisedapplauded stadium 6.7 trawledworshipped chapel 6.7 strolledbrowsed museum 6.6 cookedswam ocean 6.6 betdrew studio 6.5 showeredwaited hospital 6.3 applaudedburied sandbox 6.3 waitedfished river 6.2 trackedconfessed court 6.0 danced

ted Verbs

verb

g

VERBS, SCHEMAS, AND THEMATIC ROLES 543

APPENDIX E

Experiment 3 Items with Their Ratings as Features of Common Patients (Phood) and Agents (Ahood) and Unrela

Related verb Typical patient feature Phood Ahood Unrelated

hiring qualified 6.8 6.5 praisingtricking gullible 6.7 1.6 rescuingidolizing famous 6.6 2.4 trickingbandaging injured 6.5 1.9 firingconvicting guilty 6.5 2.6 idolizingrescuing helpless 6.5 1.4 consultingfiring dishonest 6.5 2.6 offendingoffending sensitive 6.5 2.2 convictinginvestigating suspicious 6.5 6.2 bandagingmanipulating naive 6.4 1.7 investigatinpraising outstanding 6.2 4.1 confusingcomforting upset 6.2 1.9 hiringadmiring attractive 6.2 3.3 training

ings

ood

.8

7

4

consulting experienced 6.1 4.5 manipulatingcontrolling submissive 6.1 1.6 punishingadopting abandoned 6.0 1.8 honoring

APPENDIX F

Experiment 4 Verb–Agent and Verb–Patient Pairs with Their Agenthood (Ahood) and Patienthood (Phood) Rat

Related verb Agent Ahood Phood Patient Ahood Ph

accusing prosecutor 6.8 2.6 defendant 3.6 6arresting cop 6.7 1.6 crook 1.2 5.9convicting judge 6.4 1.5 criminal 1.4 5.9curing doctor 6.8 3.8 patient 1.4 6.1entertaining comedian 6.9 2.7 audience 1.7 6.firing owner 6.3 1.9 employee 1.9 6.4grading teacher 6.9 2.6 student 2.4 6.8interviewing reporter 6.8 2.7 applicant 1.6 6.6investigating detective 6.4 1.9 suspect 2.4 6.inviting host 6.5 2.2 guest 1.9 6.4

punishing bad 6.0 3.6 adoptinghonoring respectable 5.9 5.0 controllingconfusing stupid 5.7 2.6 comfortingtraining inexperienced 5.7 1.1 admiring

questioning lawyer 6.5 2.9 witness 2.0 6.7recognizing witness 6.1 3.9 celebrity 3.8 6.8serving waitress 6.8 2.5 customer 1.5 7.0slaughtering butcher 6.2 1.4 pig 1.0 6.8teaching professor 6.6 2.6 trainee 1.6 6.3torturing rapist 6.6 2.2 slave 1.3 5.6


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(Received July 20, 1999)(Revision received April 11, 2000; published online Marc

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Integrating Verbs, Situation Schemas, and Thematic Role Concepts

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