Abstract: The event-based plausibility knowledge is playing an increasingly important role in sentence comprehension.The studies of the event-based plausibility in sentence reading can clarity the time course of different kinds of knowledge during on-line reading comprehension, as well as build the architecture of the language processing system. A number of studies have demonstrated that event-based plausibility has a strong influence on language comprehension. On the one hand, methods which are used in sentence reading can be used in event-based plausibility research; on the other hand, the studies of event-based plausibility can provide new ideas to the theory of sentence reading. Given that a number of theories of language comprehension hinge on the rapid influence of event-based plausibility, and many factors, like selectional restrictions and thematic roles, can influence the event-based plausibility, future studies should balance these factors, bilingual participants being used in experiment may be a good choice.

Key words: sentence reading, event-based plausibility, semantic understanding