The processing of word order is affected by verb subcategorization frequency: Evidence from electrophysiology

This study investigated the influence of verb subcategorization preferences on sentence processing in Standard Indonesian. We examined how verb biases affect the processing of active and passive sentences by utilizing event-related potentials. Our findings revealed that passive sentences with active-bias verbs elicited a significant late positive shift (P600) relative to active sentences, which indicated increased processing difficulty. No such effect was detected for passive sentences with passive-bias verbs. The cost was observed only where the verb's preference conflicted with the passive structure, suggesting that verb-specific statistics, rather than word order alone, contribute to the difficulty of passive sentences. We highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of sentence comprehension that incorporates both structural and lexical influences.