Constructional sources of implicit agents in sentence comprehension

Much research about on-line sentence comprehension focuses on the contributions of individual lexical items, with specific interest in verbs. One aspect of sentence meaning that has been claimed to be rooted in verb representation is event structure. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that the verb is not the sole contributor of event structure, but that the syntactic construction of a sentence is also a contributor. In this paper, we repeat a study designed to support a verb-based view using novel verbs derived from nouns. The pattern of sentence comprehension is the same for both known verbs and novel verbs, suggesting that the syntactic construction of the sentence also contributes to event structure.