Syntactic and thematic processing in sentence comprehension: Evidence for a temporal dissociation.

The time courses for processing constituent structure relations, subcategorization restrictions, and thematic role relations during sentence comprehension were measured with reaction time and speed–accuracy trade-off variants of a grammaticality judgment task. Thematic role processing was found to be delayed by as much as 100 ms relative to the time when constituent structure and subcategorization information were processed. These data suggest a model of sentence comprehension in which the construction of a syntactic representation temporally leads the construction of a more embellished thematic representation. Serial and parallel variants of such a model are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)