Gapping: Electrophysiological evidence for immediate processing of "missing" verbs in sentence comprehension

In the present study we use event related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of identification and resolution of verb gaps. ERPs were recorded while participants read sentences that contained a verb gap like Ron took/sanded the planks, and Bill Ø the hammer... Plausibility of the critical words (hammer) that followed the verb gap was manipulated. Relative to the plausible control (preceded by took), ERPs to the critical word in the implausible condition (preceded by sanded) showed an N400, followed by a positivity (P600). ERPs to determiners following gapped verbs showed a negativity between 100 and 300ms, and a positivity between 300 and 500ms compared to determiners in non-gapping constructions. These results suggest that the sentence processor recognizes a verb gap and reconstructs the verb information at the earliest possible occasion, and that this reconstruction process is different from the reconstruction of antecedents in other filler-gap constructions (e.g., WH gaps). © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.