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Title: The waitress that the customer served: Disentangling two accounts of verb processing when nouns have unexpected thematic roles

Abstract: The absence of an N400 effect at the verb between implausible and plausible sentence pairs such as “the waitress that the customer served” and “the customer that the waitress served” has been interpreted as a transient illusion of plausibility (Kuperberg et al., 2003; Kim & Osterhout, 2005; Rabovsky et al., 2018; and more). Recent evidence, including our own, has shown that delaying presentation of the verb prevents the illusion (Chow et al., 2018; Nakamura et al., 2024; Stone & Rabovsky, 2024). Liao et al. (2022) account for this delay effect by proposing that it allows time for thematic role assignment – a slow process – to constrain initial, fast verb predictions made via lexical association. In contrast, we account for the delay effect via the SG model (Rabovsky et al., 2018) and propose that the delay allows time to resolve initial conflict between lexical, syntactic, and thematic role cues, all of which are available immediately and processed simultaneously (Stone & Rabovsky, 2024). These two accounts make the same predictions about N400 amplitude at the verb, but they make different predictions about the activation of specific verbs. I will present evidence from a speeded lexical decision task in an attempt to distinguish between the accounts.