Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While people are capable of constructing a variety of inferences during text processing, recent work on inferences suggests that only a restricted number of inferences are constructed on-line. We investigated whether implicit semantic information associated with the arguments of verbs is automatically encoded. Short passives such as "The ship was sunk" are intuitively understood as containing an implicit Agent, e.g. that someone is responsible for the ship's sinking. T o investigate whether implicit Agents are encoded automatically, short passives were compared to intransitive sentences with the same propositional content The experimental logic used depended on a specific property of rationale clauses such as "to collect an insurance settlement"; namely. Uiat the contextual element associated with the understood subject of the rationale clause must be capable of volitional action. If people encode an implicit Agent while iMYKCssing short passives, then they should be able to associate it with the understood subject of a rationale clause. N o such association should be possible with inb-ansitives. In two experiments, intransitives elicited longer reading times and were judged to be less felicitous than short passives at the earliest point possible in the the rationale clause. Short passives were judged fully felicitous and their reading times did not differ from control sentences with explicit agents.