ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Cognitive Dynamics of Verb-Particle Constructions: An Eye-Tracking Study on phrasal verbs and verb-preposition combinations
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Erlangen Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
- 2Universitatsklinikum Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany
- 3Universitat Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study investigates the cognitive processing of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) using eye-tracking data to explore how English native speakers process different types of the sequence noun phrase (NP)-verb-particle-NP during reading tasks. While previous research has focused on phrasal verbs, our study extends this examination to include patterns with prepositions, aiming to identify distinct cognitive engagement patterns and processing efficiencies associated with each. We employed the Provo Corpus to analyse eye movements while participants read sentences containing these constructions, focusing on metrics such as first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past times, and total reading times. Our findings indicate similarities in the lexical verbs, and significant differences in particles, indicating how these two types of constructions are processed, with phrasal verbs sometimes processed more efficiently than the prepositional counterparts. This suggests that phrasal verbs might be more deeply entrenched in the linguistic repertoire of native speakers, possibly functioning as single lexical units. However, larger and more systematically controlled item sets are needed to test the generality of this interpretation. This research contributes to the understanding of complex structures processing and the cognitive mechanisms that support it, offering insights that could influence linguistic theory and language education.
Keywords: cognitive processing, Eye-tracking studies, LexicalAccess, LinguisticProcessing, Phrasal verbs, PrepositionalVerbs, Psycholinguistics, ReadingComprehension
Received: 30 Jul 2025; Accepted: 29 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 KISSANE, Tziridis, Schilling, Herbst and Krauss. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Patrick Krauss
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.