The goal of this research has been to better understand the nature of expectancy generation in sentence comprehension. In the current proposal, we focus specifically on the role of event knowledge in guiding expectancies. The focus is on expectancy generation both because there is empirical evidence that it plays a role in language processing, and because a comprehender's expectations as she processes a sentence provide a valuable diagnostic for addressing three central issues in sentence processing: What information is available to the comprehender? When do different sources of information become available? and How do different classes of information interact? Theoretically, our perspective reflects an emphasis on early information use, nonlinear interactions among knowledge sources, and the importance of both event-based semantic knowledge and statistical patterns of language usage, all of which are characteristics of constraint-based approaches and connectionist models. The research methodology involves a combination of corpus analyses, and human experiments, including extensive norming procedures and on-line methodologies. One important result of research in the previous period was to reveal the important role played by factors that are traditionally thought of as extra-linguistic (e.g., knowledge of event types and typical situations). Although in principle a verb-based (i.e., purely linguistic) account might be possible, some phenomena appear to be more insightfully understood as reflecting such world knowledge. This is especially the case when expectations appear to be guided by complex interactions between a verb and its multiple arguments (or event adjuncts). Such interactions would be difficult to encode within a verb's lexical representation. Accordingly, the research proposed for the next period reflects this richer view of the factors that guide sentence processing. In particular, understanding the role of event- and situation-based knowledge in the generation of expectancies during sentence processing becomes the guiding theoretical goal that motivates the research. In addition, we focus on how such knowledge might emerge in childhood as a result of experience. Understanding the mechanisms by which language is acquired in children and processed in adults provides a necessary foundation for clinical-applications that seek to diagnose and remediate language disorders that result from trauma, developmental disorders, or disease.
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