This project will continue long-term research in psycholinguistics to advance our knowledge of the cognitive processes involved in understanding the language of others. The PIs' earlier work has shed significant light on how we understand anaphoric or pronominal references and their relationship to their antecedents in the context of a discourse, and how we decide which of various possible readings of a word or phrase is the right one in a given context. The latter work has led to the focal topic of the current research. Results of their experiments and those of others, coupled with recent developments in linguistic theory, have suggested that the so-called "thematic" structure of verbs plays a key role in interpreting sentences containing those verbs. The investigators have developed a model of the language-understanding process, centered on thematic structures, that makes strong empirical predictions. The current research is a series of experiments designed to test those predictions.
