Parsing of garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs

The question addressed in this study is how lexical information stored with verbs is used during the earliest stages of syntactic analysis. The properties of a novel type of verb we term ''reciprocal verbs'' were examined in three experiments. Reciprocal verbs include hug and kiss-verbs that alternate between a transitive (e.g. Bill hugged Mary) and an intransitive form (Bill and Mary hugged), but whose intransitive form requires a conjoined subject. In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were monitored. The experiments demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic parsing. Implications for models of parsing are discussed, focusing in particular on the argument structure of reciprocal verbs as well as the role of argument-structure frequency in parsing.