Processing transitivity in reading Finnish

The present study examined whether transitive or intransitive structures are easier to process; whether the use of (in)transitivity information depends on being expressed either directly as lexical-semantic information or by morphological means; and whether (in)transitivity information in Finnish is used immediately during verb processing. Eye movement patterns of Finnish readers were registered to investigate how they use (in)transitivity information during sentence processing. In experiments 1 and 2, sentences included (in)transitive morphological and lexical change of state verbs. All morphological verbs were infrequent, and lexical verbs were both infrequent and frequent. The results showed an immediate and positive transitivity effect for transitive morphological verbs and frequent lexical verbs, but a more delayed effect for infrequent lexical verbs.