Conjunction meaning can modulate parallelism facilitation: Eye-tracking evidence from German clausal coordination

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn and-coordinated clauses, the second conjunct elicits faster reading times when it parallels (vs. does not parallel) the first in constituent order. This paper examined whether such parallelism facilitation results from simple constituent order priming from the first to the second clause, or whether it can be modulated through the linguistic context (the conjunction and clausal relations). Three eye-tracking experiments on German assessed this issue by manipulating conjunction meaning and type within subjects (resemblance: 'and' vs. adversative: 'but' or 'while'; coordinating: 'and' and 'but'; subordinating: 'while'), and by varying the clausal relations between experiments. Clausal parallelism facilitation was reduced when syntactic dependence of the clauses from a superordinate verb reinforced their coherence, and semantic expectations for 'but' and 'while' were violated through the parallel constituent order and thematic role relations of noun phrases. By contrast, it was not reduced when the same expectations were satisfied through other sentence constituents (temporally contrastive adverbs) and when the coordination involved matrix clauses. The contextual modulation of parallelism facilitation rules out simple priming as the only underlying mechanism. The observed facilitation rather reflects compositional processing of the coordinands and the conjunction in the linguistic context.

Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

“…Second, it may be that after detecting the conjunct and, the comprehender generated a new prediction for upcoming structure, conditioned on how the first conjunct was produced. Previous work has argued for a processing-based parallelism preference on ATB configurations (Frazier et al 2000;Frazier & Clifton 2001;Apel et al 2007;Sturt et al 2010;Knoeferle 2014), that is, a preference that a gap in the subsequent conjuncts is located in the same relative position as it was in the first conjunct. This parallelism preference may be attributed to a predictive mechanism (Frazier et al 2000).…”

Priming is swell, but it's far from simple

“…In such cases, it is clearly necessary for alternatives to exist (and to be sufficiently frequent that, in practice, participants can be induced to produce both alternatives). But there are other methods of inducing priming, such as priming of alternatives that differ in meaning (Scheepers 2003), priming choices in comprehension (e.g., Branigan et al 2005), priming of eye movements during comprehension (e.g., Arai et al 2007), priming response times in production (Smith & Wheeldon 2001;Segaert et al 2016), priming response times in comprehension (Knoeferle 2014), or repetition suppression of the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) adaptation (Segaert et al 2012). These methods do not always require semantically similar alternatives, and they should allow us to use priming more extensively in the future.…”

Does antecedent complexity affect ellipsis processing? An empirical investigation

“…Our second study sidesteps the issue of parallelism by using but-instead of and-coordinated sentences. Unlike and, but evokes no expectation of parallelism between the two conjuncts, and indeed parallelism does not facilitate processing for but-conjoined sentences (Knoeferle 2014). The main goal of Experiment 2 was to investigate whether antecedent complexity effects in ellipsis processing are sensitive to task demands, as suggested by Phillips & Parker (2014) and Paape (2016).…”