Eye movements and thematic processing

This chapter reviews studies investigating thematic processing during reading focusing on those that have used eye movement methodology. It is suggested that thematic processing represents an important aspect of comprehension that is an intermediary of relatively lower level psycholinguistic processes (such as lexical identification and parsing) and higher level discourse processing. It is also argued that wh-words induce thematic expectations and that thematic processing preferences for arguments influence eye movements very rapidly, whereas those for adjuncts have a delayed effect. The chapter concludes with a brief evaluation of the role of thematic processing in three theories of sentence processing.