Argument role sensitivity in real-time sentence processing: Evidence from a hybrid comprehension and production task

Previous studies suggest that comprehenders initially fail to use argument roles (i.e., who did what to whom) when generating expectations for upcoming words in sentence processing. In contrast, production studies show that people rarely produce role-inappropriate sentence continuations in a speeded cloze task, indicating rapid use of argument roles. This contrast in role-sensitivity is unexpected if both situations involve the same underlying processes and if the experimental measures equally reflect those processes. Here, we show that the apparent conflict arises from different task demands involved in comprehension and production experiments, and that when they are engaged in an identical next-word generation task, people show immediate use of argument roles in both comprehension and production. In two experiments, participants had to either produce a continuation of a sentence fragment or judge the plausibility of a complete sentence. The trial types were interleaved and presented randomly, which ensured that the sentence contexts were processed in the same way. In Experiment 1, we found rapid use of argument roles in the production trials, where participants produced target verbs more frequently and with faster onset times in role-appropriate than in role-reversed contexts, indicating that role-sensitivity in production was unaffected by the interleaved comprehension trials. In Experiment 2, the same hybrid design was used to measure role-sensitivity in the comprehension trials, while participants quickly produced sentence continuations in the interleaved production trials. A significantly smaller N400 was observed on target verbs presented in role-appropriate contexts than in role-reversed contexts, indicating immediate role-sensitivity in comprehension, as found in production. Together, the results indicate that argument roles have an immediate impact on processing, in both comprehension and production, when there is a need to quickly commit to a single next-word continuation. Our findings shed light on the connection between speaking and understanding, and more broadly, the relationship between perception and action in cognitive science.