Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes the use of on-line processing of anaphoric reference to explore the structure of sentence representations. Of central concern is whether or not the representation of verbs is componential The differential amounts of processing required by subjects to resolve references to objects and simple or complex actions was used to provide insights into the nature of the internal representation of sentences. Two conditions were created; one in which componential effects occured, and another in which they did not. It was concluded that processing demands dictated the nature of the representation, and that either a wholistic or compnential mode of representation could be used on-line with equal facility