The Influence of only on Syntactic processing of “Long” Relative Clause Sentences

Abstract

We report an eye movement experiment investigating the influence of the focus operator only on syntactic processing of "long" relative clause sentences. Paterson, Liversedge, and Underwood (1999) found that readers were garden pathed by "short" reduced relative clause sentences containing the focus operator only. They argued that due to thematic differences between "short" and "long" relative clause sentences, garden path effect might not occur when "long" reduced relative clause sentences are read. Eye-tracking data show that garden path effects found during initial processing of the disambiguating verb of "long" reduced sentences without only were absent or delayed in the case of counterparts with only. We discuss our results in terms of current theories of sentence processing.

The influence of only and even on online semantic interpretation

“…Relatively little psycholinguistic research has investigated how these devices influence online language comprehension, with existing work concentrating on the influence of only on the processing of syntactic ambiguities (following Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1996; see also Filik, Paterson, & Liversedge, 2005;Liversedge, Paterson, & Clayes, 2002;Paterson, Liversedge, & Underwood, 1999;Sedivy, 2002) or the acquisition of semantics (Paterson, Liversedge, Rowland, & Filik, 2003). There has been much less research into the nature of the contrasts these words elicit, but see Paterson et al (2007) for evidence that contrastive focus is computed online during sentence processing.…”

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

“…Rereading time (cf. Liversedge, Paterson, & Clayes, 2002) is the sum of all fixation durations from the reader's first fixation after regressing from a region until the first fixation to the right of the region. For the final region, we summed all the fixations after a regression until the reader pressed the button to indicate that they had understood the sentence.…”

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

“…English includes the focus particles only, just, even, also and too that when included in a sentence indicate that the extension of some linguistic element is to be contrasted with a set of alternatives. Some researchers have used the contrastive function of only to investigate whether non-syntactic information can guide the processing of syntactic ambiguities (Clifton, Bock, & Rado, 2000;Liversedge, Paterson, & Clayes, 2002;Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1996;Paterson, Liversedge, & Underwood, 1999;Sedivy, 2002). Others have used it to investigate the acquisition and development of linguistic constraints on sentence interpretation (Crain, Ni, & Conway, 1994;Crain, Philip, Drozd, Roeper, & Matsuoka, 1992;Halbert, Crain, Shankweiler, & Woodams, 1995;Philip & Lynch, 1999).…”