Semantic Effects of a Pre-verbal Argument on the Online Processing of Korean Sentences: An Eye-tracking Study

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine the role of the lexical semantic information of pre-verbal arguments in the online processing of sentences. More specifically, it was examined whether the semantic information of the subject can predictively restrict the semantic domain of the upcoming argument even before the verb is introduced into the string. Given that the speakers of SOV languages can produce and process verb-final sentences without any difficulties, other information than that from a verb should be involved in the sentence processing so that the speakers do not have to wait until the end of a clause. In our eye-tracking experiment, 38 participants showed anticipatory eye-movements to the picture of the direct object (e.g., food) as soon as hearing a semantically related subject (e.g., cook), but did not when the subject (e.g., Yenghi) was semantically neutral to the object. These results confirm the predictive mechanism of the parsing system and the semantic effect of a pre-verbal argument: that is, using the semantic information of a pre-verbal argument which is available early in the input, the parser can rapidly limit the semantic type of the following argument. In this way, a verb-final language can be processed immediately and incrementally.