Charting the time-course of VP-ellipsis sentence comprehension: Evidence for an initial and independent structural analysis

Abstract

We exploited the properties of VP-ellipsis constructions containing inherently reflexive and inalienable possession verbs that severely constrained final interpretation (e.g., "The policeman perjured himself, and the fireman did too…"). Using the cross-modal lexical priming task, we found that listeners reactivated the subject NP from the first clause at the elided position in the second clause (i.e., the "strict" reading), even though verb properties disallowed such an interpretation. We also found that listeners reactivated the subject NP from the second clause, demonstrating the "sloppy" interpretation. In a final experiment we examined VP-ellipsis constructions that did not contain anaphors (e.g., "The mailman bought a tie for Easter, and his brother did too…"). We found that only the object NP of the first clause was reconstructed in the second clause. We interpret these findings as support for a parser that computes multiple interpretations on-line, yet is initially insensitive to lexical and probabilistic information. KeywordsLanguage comprehension; VP-ellipsis; Syntax; Lexical There is no shortage of fundamental issues that remain unresolved in the study of language processing. Even the most basic assumptions continue to be questioned (as they should be). For example, though on some accounts it is common to assume 'separate' lexical, syntactic, and semantic operations when processing sentences, it remains unclear where to draw the boundaries. Indeed, given some theoretical viewpoints it is not entirely clear whether such boundaries are necessary (e.g., Bates & Goodman, 1997;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; but see Frazier, 1995). In the following study, we consider some of these fundamental issues by examining how on-line operations give way to final sentence interpretation. Specifically, we describe three experiments investigating how normal listeners understand constructions containing covert material that is inherent in verb phrase (VP) ellipsis. In two experiments we examine if lexical properties that constrain final interpretation also affect momentary, on-line comprehension. In a third experiment we examine which noun phrase arguments are 'reconstructed' at the elided VP site. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptWe begin with a linguistic characterization of VP-ellipsis constructions. Our focus on the linguistic underpinnings of such constructions is justified, we feel, by the descriptive details linguistic theory offers, and also by the fruit it has borne for accounts of language processing. We then discuss previous efforts investigating the comprehension of ellipsis constructions and attempt to ground this work in accounts of sentence processing. We then move on to the description of our current experiments and the discussion of our results. We are ultimately interested in the time-course of activation and use of different kinds of information, which, in turn, should shed light on the architecture of the sentence processing system and its m...

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A content-addressable pointer mechanism underlies comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis☆

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