Abstract
The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming during on-line processing of Dutch sentences. Results are contrasted with data from a third CMLP experiment on priming of nouns in similar sentences. It is demonstrated that the meaning of a matrix verb remains active throughout the entire matrix clause, while this is not the case for the meaning of a subject head noun. Activation of the meaning of the verb only dissipates upon encountering a clear signal as to the start of a new clause.
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Acknowledgements
The researchwas supported by grant #360-70-090 from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to Roelien Bastiaanse, and by grant DC000494 to Lewis Shapiro and grant DC02984 to David Swinney by the National Institutes of Health. We express our appreciation to Tracy Love, Edwin Maas, Dirk-Bart den Ouden, and MarlousWestra for their help and advice during various stages of the project, and to Claudia Felser, Roel Jonkers, Dirk-Bart den Ouden and Frank Wijnen for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We dedicate this work to our dear friend and colleague Dave Swinney, who passed away in April 2006.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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de Goede, D., Shapiro, L.P., Wester, F. et al. The Time Course of Verb Processing in Dutch Sentences. J Psycholinguist Res 38, 181–199 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9117-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9117-3