Abstract
Fodor, Garrett, and Bever have reported two experiments suggesting that sentences containing complex verbs are more difficult to comprehend than ones containing simple verbs. However, the tasks they used, paraphrasing and anagram solving, reflect comprehension difficulty only very indirectly. Both of the present experiments compared the difficulty of sentences containing simple and complex verbs using the paraphrasing task and also a task that assesses on-line comprehension difficulty, phoneme monitoring. The paraphrasing task yielded the predicted effect in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. The phoneme monitoring task failed to yield the effect in either experiment. Two alternative accounts were suggested for the present data as well as those of Fodor et al.
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The present research was supported by HEW Grant OEG-0-70-3450(508). The author wishes to thank Barbara Tabor for her assistance in both experiments, Jeff Lehman for his assistance in Experiment 2, and Donald J. Foss for his assistance and comments.
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Hakes, D.T. Does verb structure affect sentence comprehension?. Perception & Psychophysics 10, 229–232 (1971). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212810
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212810