Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have found a processing difference between unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences. Theyargued that the difference is derived from a syntactic difference, i.e. an unaccusative sentence involves movement whereas anunergative sentence does not. In this study, we are going to show that those studies are uninterpretable due to uncontrolledstimuli and confounds in the materials. After examining their data anlysis, we argue that the effects they found does seem to bestable. This reopens the question whether there is a syntactic difference between unaccusative and unergative verbs.