The Professor Chewed the Students…Out: Effects of Dependency, Length, and Adjacency on Word Order Preferences in Sentences with Verb Particle Constructions

Abstract

Recent research has begun to investigate the relationship between processing difficulty and preferred grammatical structures.In three studies, we examine verb-particle constructions, such as look up, which can occur in different grammatical orders.First, we measured speakers' sensitivity to the semantic similarity of verb-particle constructions (look up) and corresponding verbs (look).Results of a masked priming task demonstrated that participants are sensitive to this gradation in similarity (e.g., chew out vs. finish up), with only more similar items producing facilitation.Finally, participants read sentences in a self-paced reading task that varied on three dimensions: 1) dependency of the verb and particle for meaning (e.g., chew depends on out in chew out, but finish does not depend on up for its meaning; 2) adjacency (look the number up vs. look up the number); and 3) length of the direct object noun phrase.Reading times increased for more dependent verbparticle constructions, shifted sentences, and sentences with long intervening noun phrases.These findings support the proposal that performance factors affect word order preferences (Hawkins, 1994(Hawkins, , 2004)).

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