@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/ml.6.3.03wit, author = "Wittenberg, Eva and PiƱango, Maria Mercedes", title = "Processing light verb constructions", journal= "The Mental Lexicon", year = "2011", volume = "6", number = "3", pages = "393-413", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.6.3.03wit", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ml.6.3.03wit", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "1871-1340", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "light verb construction", keywords = "argument structure", keywords = "linguistic architecture", keywords = "processing", keywords = "syntactic composition", keywords = "cross-modal lexical decision", keywords = "semantic composition", abstract = "Henry gave Elsa a kissgivekissgivea kissWe test two approaches to light verb constructions: (1) joint predication in light verb constructions is stored as pre-specified, and their high frequency predicts less processing cost. (2) Joint predication in light verb constructions is built in real-time. The entailed extra-syntactic composition predicts greater cost.Results from a cross-modal lexical decision task show delayed, higher reaction times for light verb constructions, supporting (2), which is consistent with a linguistic architecture that has partly autonomous lexico-semantic storage and processing.", }