A study investigated differential processing of adjectival and verbal passives in English, and the implications for linguistic theory. The subjects, 30 native-English-speaking college students, were presented with word triples in which one member was an adjective, one an adjectival passive, and one a verbal passive, and with three two-sentence passages for each triple, constructed so the last word of each passage could be any of the three words in the triple. Reading time and response times to probe and comprehension questions were recorded. Results showed that the responses to the binding probe, when the sentence contained a verbal passive, were different from responses to the same probe in the other two constructions, suggesting that the language processor treats verbal passives differently from superficially similar adjectives and adjectival passives. The direction of the effect is consistent with a government binding analysis of verbal passives that incorporate noun phrase movement and bound trace. Additional implications are examined and further research to extend these findings is recommended. (MSE)