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Abstract
This study investigates how sentences of subject-verb-object type are comprehended. We adopted a usage-based approach by first selecting a high frequency and a low frequency sentence frame (SF) determined by the same verb, each SF being characterised by its subject and object belonging to some semantic categories for a specific verb. It was observed in Experiment 1 that the time of comprehending the verb and activating its specific sense through accessing the subject-object semantic features is a significant component of the total sentence comprehension time. Experiment 2 validated the definition of SF frequency by observing SF repetition effects without repetitions of any surface constituents, as long as the subject-object pairs for each verb are characterised by specific semantic features. It may further be concluded that it is not syntactic structure frequency, but sentence frame frequency that is critical in the reading of sentences.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by National Science Council grants to I.-m. L. and I.-r. S. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.