Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Among the interpersonal verbs, there is a class of causal verbs with implicit causality and implicit consequentiality, which can refer to the cause and effect of an event on the subject or the object of a sentence. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether focus or integration theory is supported by examining the interplay within Chinese causal verb processing. The study collected 36 participants and used an eye tracker in a visual world paradigm to understand the processing of causal verbs. The results indicated that, different from English, the processing of causal verbs in Chinese supported integration theory.