Passives are not hard to interpret but hard to remember: evidence from online and offline studies

Abstract

Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active sentences. Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalisation. The current paper directly compares online and offline processing of passivization and manipulates verb type: state vs. event. Stative passives are temporarily ambiguous (adjectival vs. verbal), eventive passives are not (always verbal). Across 4 experiments (self-paced reading with comprehension questions), passives were consistently read faster than actives. This contradicts the claim that passives are difficult to parse and/or interpret, as argued by main perspectives of passive processing (heuristic, syntactic, frequentist). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-role assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures correlated with the difference in accuracy, but not online measures. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with maintaining/manipulating the passive representation as required by specific tasks.