Sentence Processing and The Mental Representation of Persian verbs

This study investigates Persian verb processing during sentence comprehension. The question is whether or not the representational complexity of Persian verbs in lexicon affects real-time sentence processing in normal listeners.Complexity has been defined in terms of the kinds of structural (syntactic) and lexical (semantic) information arrayed against verbs in their lexical entries. The method contained cross-modal lexical decision (CMLD) task which examined on-line sentence processing and run by reaction time measuring software program naming DMDX. The stimuli consisted of 72 simple intransitive and 72 simple transitive Persian verbs used in the formation of 288 sentences. Performing the test processing time of those sentences has been measured and then compared to each other. Regarding the findings, the processing time can be attributed to theindependent variable of "verb class" and "sentence type". As for the results, they showed that sentence and verb processing are affected by syntactic and semantic modules of grammar. It is related to syntax since sentence type variable and the number of complements are two defining factors of sentence processing time and to semantics since the number of semantic roles attributed to participants in the verb event directly affect sentence processing. In other words, verb processing time within sentence during sentence comprehension is affected by sentence syntactic structure (simple vs. complex) and verb type (transitive vs. intransitive).