Several studies have demonstrated that as listeners hear sentences describing events in a scene, their eye movements anticipate upcoming linguistic items predicted by the unfolding relationship between scene and sentence. While this may reflect active prediction based on structural or contextual expectations, the influence of local thematic priming between words has not been fully examined. In Experiment 1, we presented verbs (e.g., arrest) in active (Subject-Verb-Object) sentences with displays containing verb-related patients (e.g., crook) and agents (e.g., policeman). We examined patient and agent fixations following the verb, after the agent role had been filled by another entity, but prior to bottom-up specification of the object. Participants were nearly as likely to fixate agents "anticipatorily" as patients, even though the agent role was already filled. However, the slight patient advantage suggested simultaneous influences of both local priming and active prediction. In Experiment 2, using passives (Object-Verb-Subject), we found stronger, but still graded influences of role prediction when more time elapsed between verb and target, and more syntactic cues were available. We interpret anticipatory fixations as emerging from constraint-based processes that involve both non-predictive thematic priming and active prediction.

Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of semantics. The research reported here investigated the influence of semantic transparency on long-term morphological priming. Two experiments demonstrated that while lexical decisions were facilitated by semantically transparent primes like TEACHER, semantically opaque words like CORNER had no effect. Although differences in the nonword foils used in each experiment gave rise to somewhat different patterns of results, this difference in the effects of transparent and opaque primes was found in both experiments. The implications of this finding for accounts of morphological effects on visual word identification are discussed.

Recent work in embodied cognition has demonstrated that language comprehension involves the motor system (e.g., Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). Such findings are often attributed to mechanisms involving simulations of linguistically described events (Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008). We propose that research paradigms in which simulation is the central focus need to be augmented with paradigms that probe the organization of the motor system during language comprehension. The use of well-studied motor tasks may be appropriate to this endeavour. To this end, we present a study in which participants perform a bimanual rhythmic task (Kugler & Turvey, 1987) while judging the plausibility of sentences. We show that the dynamics of the bimanual task differ when participants judge sentences describing performable actions as opposed to sentences describing events that are not performable. We discuss the general implications of our results for accounts of embodied cognition.