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Processing Gapped Verbs

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Abstract

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

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, Box 115454, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Edith Kaan & Carlie Overfelt

  2. Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Do Tromp

  3. Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Wijnen

Authors
  1. Edith Kaan
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  2. Carlie Overfelt
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  3. Do Tromp
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  4. Frank Wijnen
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Correspondence to Edith Kaan.

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Kaan, E., Overfelt, C., Tromp, D. et al. Processing Gapped Verbs. J Psycholinguist Res 42, 307–338 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-012-9220-8

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