Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When native English speakers say active and passive sentences, verb stems are longer in passive sentences thanin their active counterparts (Stromswold et al., 2002; Rehrig et al., 2015) because phrase-final lengthening and polysyllabicshortening cause the verb stem vowel to be longer in passives (Aveni et al., 2016; Mayro et al., 2016). Eye-tracking and gatingstudies of unaltered sentences revealed that listeners are able to predict whether a sentence is active or passive prior to hearingthe inflection on the verb (Stromswold et al., 2002; 2016). To examine whether listeners use vowel duration in online sentencecomprehension, we lengthened the vowel in half of the active verb stems and shortened it in half of the passive verb stems.Reaction times were longer for sentences with altered verb stem vowels (p < .001), consistent with listeners using verb stemvowel duration as a predictive cue in online comprehension.