Complement coercion as the processing of aspectual verbs: evidence from self-paced reading and fMRI

Abstract

The so-called coercion verbs have been taken to select for an event as their complement, and to coerce an entity-denoting complement into an event as a resolution to the predictable type mismatch. This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., begin) but not psychological verbs (e.g., enjoy) (Katsika et al. 2012), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Piñango and Deo 2015 ). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual. These verbs encode a set of functions that allow the construal of the structured individual as an axis along a dimension (e.g. spatial, eventive) afforded by the complement. The processing cost associated with the composition of the “coercion configuration” (animate subject + aspectual verb + entity-denoting complement) emerges from (A) exhaustive retrieval of the verbs’ lexical functions and (B) resolution of dimension ambiguity. Results from a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment confirm that processing aspectual-verb sentences is more costly than psychological-verb counterparts, and that consistently with previous findings, comprehension is associated with both a Wernicke’s area and a left inferior frontal cortex activation. Crucially, this activation pattern tracks the necessary exhaustive lexical retrieval of the functions at the verb (Wernicke’s area) and the subsequent ambiguity resolution of the dimension at the complement (LIFG) required for the interpretation of the aspectual-verb utterance.