Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking

Abstract

In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure.

Is reanalysis selective when regressions are consciously controlled?

“…The early disambiguation penalty at the NP that we observed for unambiguous object-first sentences in both experiments is well-attested in German (Hemforth, 1993;Konieczny, 1996;Paape et al, 2018). The acceptability of OVS word order in German partly depends on contextual licensing conditions (Verhoeven & Temme, 2017;Weskott, Hörnig, Fanselow, & Kliegl, 2011) which may not always have been fully met in our items, despite prescreening for subjective acceptability by two native speakers.…”

Is reanalysis selective when regressions are consciously controlled?

“…The early disambiguation penalty at the NP that we observed for unambiguous objectfirst sentences in both experiments is well-attested in German (Hemforth, 1993;Konieczny, 1996;Paape et al, 2018). The acceptability of OVS word order in German partly depends on contextual licensing conditions (Verhoeven & Temme, 2017;Weskott, Hörnig, Fanselow, & Kliegl, 2011) which may not always have been fully met in our items, despite prescreening for subjective acceptability by two native speakers.…”

“…( The second set of sentences contained an ambiguity that does not exist in English, namely a subject-object ambiguity based on syncretism between nominative and accusative case for feminine noun phrases. German native speakers preferably analyze clause-initial case-ambiguous noun phrases as nominative-marked subjects and experience a garden path when the clause is disambiguated towards object-initial word order through number agreement on the verb (e.g., Hemforth, 1993;Meng & Bader, 2000a;Paape, Hemforth, & Vasishth, 2018). An example sentence is shown in (3).…”

The role of incremental and superficial processing in the depth charge illusion: Experimental and modeling evidence

“…9 Similar findings are reported by Dwivedi (2013) for sentences with ambiguous quantifier scope. There is also evidence that processing is slowed when underspecified or comparatively less specified linguistic representations are accessed by downstream retrieval triggers such as verbs or syntactic gaps (Hofmeister, 2011;Hofmeister & Vasishth, 2014;Paape, Hemforth, & Vasishth, 2018). 10 Given these findings, if the mental representations of depth charge sentences are underspecified, subjecting them to downstream processing operations should create difficulty, especially if these operations require fully specified propositions as input.…”