MacDonald et al.'s (1994) constraint-based theory predicts difficulty in reading sentences such as "The professor read the newspaper had been destroyed" when the sentence structure is inconsistent with what?

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MacDonald et al.'s constraint-based theory predicts difficulty in reading sentences like "The professor read the newspaper had been destroyed" when the sentence structure is inconsistent with verb bias. This is because verb bias, which is the tendency for certain verbs to be more likely to occur with certain noun types (e.g., "read" is more likely to occur with nouns like book or newspaper), allows readers to predict and prepare for upcoming syntactic structures. When the sentence structure is inconsistent with verb bias, it creates processing difficulty.

MacDonald Et Al