Fill the Gap! Combining Pragmatic and Prosodic Information to Make Gapping Easy

Abstract

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.

The Role ofOnlyin Contrasts In and Out of Context

“…This result is consistent with previous work on the processing of replacives (Carlson, 2002) and a body of work on ellipsis processing in general (Carlson, 2001, 2002; Carlson, Dickey, & Kennedy, 2005; Carlson et al, 2009; Frazier & Clifton, 1998; Hoeks, Redeker, & Hendriks, 2009; Stolterfoht et al, 2007, etc.). Carlson et al (2009) explain this pattern as coming from the fact that the natural position of focus in an English sentence is on the last argument (e.g., Cinque, 1991; Selkirk, 1984), and so processors expect the object to be focused rather than the subject.…”

“…For example, Altmann, van Nice, Garnham, and Henstra (1998) found that a question context could cause usually optional adverbial phrases to be predicted in particular syntactic positions. Another demonstration of the effect of context questions comes from Hoeks, Redeker, and Hendriks (2009), who studied ambiguous gapping sentences.…”

In the eye of the listener: Pupil dilation elucidates discourse processing

“…This finding is in line with the N400 components in the ERP study by Toepel et al (2009) under identical processing conditions. Moreover, N400 modulations and behavioral effects are commonly reported when the prosodic realization of an utterance is not in agreement with the syntactic sentence structure or the information structure of a discourse (sentence processing: Heim and Alter, 2006;Mietz et al, 2008;Schafer et al, 2000;Steinhauer et al, 1999;Warren et al, 1995;discourse processing: Alter et al, 2001;Hoeks et al, 2009;Hruska and Alter, 2004). That is, increased pupil dilation responses when perceiving new information and corrections that do not bear adequate focus prosody in light of the preceding question context indicate that the conditions are similarly resource consuming for listeners.…”

Segmental and Prosodic Approaches to Accent Management

“…For example, an early seminal work of Miller and Isard (1963) demonstrated improved recall of oral presentation of nonsense words or ungrammatical strings of words if the items were presented with typical sentence prosody rather than simply spoken as a list. More recently, prosody has been shown to be important in processing ambiguous sentences (Joeks, Redeker, & Hendriks, 2009;Titone et al, 2006) and processing of humorous stories and jokes (Wennerstrom, 2011).…”