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

Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active ones. Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalization. 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 or syntactic). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-roles assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures did not correlate with the difference in accuracy, excluding it as an explanation. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with generating/maintaining a propositional representation of passives required by specific tasks.