Forms of coding in sentence comprehension during reading

It is widely believed that the syntactic processor operating upon sentences during reading needs to use a phonological buffer, upon whose contents this processor operates. We provide evidence for this view using verb-gapped sentences such as Sue polished the table and Frank the shoes. Subjects were asked to detect semantic anomalies in such sentences, the anomalies being dependent upon the relationship of the verb to the object noun phrase in the second clause (as in Sue polished the table and Frank the sea). Anomaly detection was slower or less accurate for those anomalous sentences where a homophone of the verb would yield an acceptable sentence (as in he rights injustices and she books), suggesting that when the syntactic processor is dealing with verb gaps, the filling of the gap involves consulting phonological representations from the first clause. It turned out that processing of these sentences was also impeded when the verb and its gap differed in number, even when past tenses, where singular and plural verbs do not differ in phonology, are used (as in Your friends mended the car and your brother the bike). Implications of this result, and of the homophone effect, for modelling sentence processing are considered.