Two experiments tested the conjecture that the presence of semantic constraints facilitates the recovery of logical/underlying roles of noun phrases. In experiment I, semantic constraints reduced the time required to extract these internal relations for active and passive sentences but did not affect the time to verify the logical/underlying role of a NP probe. In Experiment II, semantic constraints reduced the time required to comprehend passive sentences, but there was no overall facilitative effect of semantic constraints. In neither experiment was there a constant syntactic processing effect of sentence voice.
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