Eyetracking while reading passives: an event structure account of difficulty

ABSTRACT

Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading experiments, with no modulation of verb type. However, self-paced reading provides limited direct measurement of late revision/interpretive processing. We used modified stimuli from Paolazzi et al. (2019) to re-examine this issue in two eye-tracking while reading experiments. We found that in late measures, passives with subject-experiencer verbs had longer fixation durations than actives at the verb and two subsequent regions but no difference was observed across agent-patient verbs. Subject-experiencer verbs provide a state, but the passive structure requires an event. Thus, the required eventive interpretation is coerced with subject-experiencers (if possible) and induces difficulty.

KEYWORDS:

• Event structure
• sentence processing
• eye-tracking
• passive sentence

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge BA/Leverhulme Small Grants SRG\170108 to Andrea Santi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An anonymous reviewer pointed out that “a quick Google search shows that “the hating of … ” is clearly acceptable (and therefore presumably considered grammatical by) quite a few people (97,000 results), as is “the fearing of … ” (10,000 results).” The argument, however, is not that “the hating/fearing of” is ungrammatical, but that the full passive nominal is ungrammatical. Searching for “the hating of * by” on Google delivers only nine results, none of which is a full passive (in each instance the by-phrase is not part of the nominal and only introduces the author of a song or article which contains the string “the hating of” in the title). Similar search for “the fearing of * by” only delivers two results.

2 An anonymous reviewer asked that the measures “first pass” and “right bound” be renamed “gaze duration” and “go-past”.

3 NA values were excluded prior to data analysis

4 The model only converged with intercepts and no slopes in the random effect structure.

5 The model converged appropriately with both intercepts and Syntax slope for subject random effects only

6 The model for total time failed to converge

7 The interactions between predicate and experiment are explicable in terms of the predicate type having a larger effect when manipulated between participants than within participants.