The Role of UID for the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Psycholinguistic Evidence From Length and Context Effects

Abstract

We investigate the underexplored question of when speakers make use of the omission phenomenon verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English given that the full form is also available to them. We base the interpretation of our results on the well-established information-theoretic Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis: Speakers tend to distribute processing effort uniformly across utterances and avoid regions of low information by omitting redundant material through, e.g., VPE. We investigate the length of the omittable VP and its predictability in context as sources of redundancy which lead to larger or deeper regions of low information and an increased pressure to use ellipsis. We use both naturalness rating and self-paced reading studies in order to link naturalness patterns to potential processing difficulties. For the length effects our rating and reading results support a UID account. Surprisingly, we do not find an effect of the context on the naturalness and the processing of VPE. We suggest that our manipulation might have been too weak or not effective to evidence such an effect.

Elliptical Responses to Direct and Indirect Requests for Information

“…Our results also have implications for psycholinguistic approaches to ellipsis production. Psycholinguistic approaches generally view the selection of elliptical responses as the result of efficiency principles (e.g., Bergen & Goodman, 2015; Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020; Schäfer et al, 2021). It is our sense that these accounts would capture the basic fact that our participants generated elliptical responses to requests for information.…”

“…to begin the response is not informative or efficient. The beginning of the response could therefore be eliminated to generate a more efficient, elliptical utterance (e.g., Schäfer et al, 2021). Nevertheless, we do not think that extant psycholinguistic accounts currently provide a full explanation of our results.…”

“…For example, Bergen and Goodman (2015) argue that listeners' awareness that language is a noisy channel of communication licenses the inferences needed to recover the meaning of an elliptical response. Schäfer et al (2021) suggest that a desire to maintain an optimal flow of information in the communication channel (avoiding being overly informative or underinformative) explains some aspects of the use of ellipsis. For example, when asked Who did you go to the movies with last night?, the underlined part of the response I went to the movies with Jane is underinformative and therefore likely to be elided.…”

“…1.2 Prior studies: Clark (1979) and Levelt and Kelter (1982) The RAMP framework is supported by theoretical and empirical work in linguistics and psycholinguistics (e.g., Hankamer & Sag, 1976;Levelt & Kelter, 1982;Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020;Schäfer et al, 2021). Much of the empirical support for the RAMP principles come from language comprehension experiments (e.g., Martin & McElree, 2011), rating studies (e.g., Nykiel et al, 2022;Schäfer et al, 2021), and corpus analyses (e.g., Nykiel, 2015Nykiel, , 2017Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020), though there have been a smaller number of experiments eliciting production of elliptical forms (e.g., Lemke et al, 2022). This previous work has value in illuminating the constraints involved in the use of ellipsis.…”

“…For example, an utterance can be difficult to hear because of ambient noise, and can contain different sorts of disfluencies and speech errors. Approaches to ellipsis have been developed based both on the idea of language as a noisy communication channel (e.g., Bergen & Goodman, 2015) and on different sorts of efficiency constraints on language use and processing (e.g., Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020; Schäfer et al, 2021). For example, Bergen and Goodman (2015) argue that listeners’ awareness that language is a noisy channel of communication licenses the inferences needed to recover the meaning of an elliptical response.…”