How to prune a garden path by nipping it in the bud: Fast priming of verb argument structure

The syntactic preferences of briefly displayed prime words were found to affect readers' ability to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities. In two self-paced reading experiments, participants read target sentences containing ambiguous sentence complements (e.g., "The photographer accepted the fire could not be put out."), in which "the fire" could be the direct object of the main verb "accepted," or the subject of a sentence complement. A briefly displayed prime verb (duration of 39 ms) appeared immediately prior to reading the main verb. and had a significant impact on syntactic misanalysis effects for the ambiguous sentence complement. Priming the matrix verb with a verb that tends to be used with a direct object (e.g., "obtained") resulted in increased processing difficulty in the disambiguating region of the sentence complement (e.g., "could"). Priming the matrix verb with a verb that tends to be used with a sentence complement (e.g., "realized") resulted in significantly less processing difficulty in the disambiguating region. The results are consistent with constraint-based theories of sentence processing that make immediate use of lexically specific information. (C) 1998 Academic Press.