Because there was a cause for concern: An investigation into a word-specific prediction account of the implicit-causality effect

Abstract

In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as “David blamed Linda because she_{(bias-congruent)}/he_{(bias-incongruent)} … ” when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the implicit-causality verb. The authors suggested that these immediate delays could be attributed to participants predicting a bias-congruent pronoun after because. According to this explanation, any other word placed after because should cause processing delays. The present investigation aimed to test this explanation by using sentences of the form “David blamed Linda because she_{(bias-congruent)}/he_{(bias-incongruent)}/there_{(bias-neutral)} … ”. Since significant immediate delays were observed in sentences containing a bias-incongruent pronoun (relative to a bias-congruent pronoun) but not in sentences containing there, the results of this study support an immediate integration effect but pose a problem to the word-specific prediction account of the implicit causality effect.