Fill the gap! Combining pragmatic and prosodic information to make gapping easy.
Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called 'nongapping' reading, where John greeted Ben, and the highly unpreferred 'gapping' reading, where Ben greeted Paul. In the first experiment, participants listened to dialogues and gave a speeded response as to which reading of an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. In the second experiment, they also responded to a visual probe that was presented during the presentation of the ambiguous target. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects on both on-line processing and off-line interpretation of gapping; in the right combination they can make gapping as easy as the normally preferred nongapping reading.
Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. j.c.j.hoeks@rug.nl
John C J
JC
Hoeks
Gisela
G
Redeker
Petra
P
Hendriks
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult