Filling the Silence: Reactivation, not Reconstruction

Paape, Dario

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00027

Cited by 6 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…A recent study by Paape [ 1 ] investigated whether ellipsis is processed differently depending on whether the antecedent contains a temporary syntactic ambiguity or not. A German example stimulus from the study, adapted slightly in favor of brevity, is shown in (2).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the control condition, the auxiliary bears singular marking and thus agrees with the initial noun phrase, allowing an SVO reading. In a self-paced reading experiment, Paape [ 1 ] found that reading times were increased at the second noun phrase in the OVS version of (2a) compared to the SVO version. No such effect was observed in the two additional control sentences in (2b), where the first noun phrase carries overt case marking.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking

Paape

Vasishth

2018

PLoS ONE

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In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking

Paape

Vasishth

2018

PLoS ONE

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“…This section describes how the acceptability cline observed in Experiment 1 can be captured under a memory-based account in a single structure-building architecture. A growing number of studies suggest that ellipsis is resolved in real-time by retrieving an antecedent using a cue-based retrieval mechanism (Martin & McElree 2008;Martin et al 2012;Paape 2016). Importantly, this is the exact same mechanism that has been argued to underlie many other cases of "acceptable ungrammaticalities", such as those observed for agreement, anaphora, case licensing, and negative polarity item licensing (Vasishth et al 2008;Wagers et al 2009;Dillon et al 2013;Sloggett 2013;Tanner et al 2014;Lago et al 2015;Tucker et al 2015;Parker & Phillips 2016;Patil et al 2016).…”

Section: Computational Model Of Antecedent-ellipsis Mismatchesmentioning

confidence: 90%

A memory-based explanation of antecedent-ellipsis mismatches: New insights from computational modeling

Parker

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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An active question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the parser and grammar reflect distinct cognitive systems. Recent evidence for a distinct-systems view comes from cases of ungrammatical but acceptable antecedent-ellipsis mismatches (e.g., *Tom kicked Bill, and Matt was kicked by Tom too.). The finding that these mismatches show varying degrees of acceptability has been presented as evidence for the use of extra-grammatical parsing strategies that restructure a mismatched antecedent to satisfy the syntactic constraints on ellipsis (Arregui et al. 2006; Kim et al. 2011). In this paper, I argue that it is unnecessary to posit a special class of parserspecific rules to capture the observed profiles, and that acceptable mismatches do not reflect a parser-grammar misalignment. Rather, such effects are a natural consequence of a single structure-building system (i.e., the grammar) that relies on noisy, domain-general memory access mechanisms to retrieve an antecedent from memory. In Experiment 1, I confirm the acceptability profiles reported in previous work. Then in Experiment 2, as proof-of-concept, I show using an established computational model of memory retrieval that the observed acceptability profiles follow from independently motivated principles of working memory, without invoking multiple representational systems. These results contribute to a uniform memory-based account of acceptable ungrammaticalities for a wide range of dependencies.

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“…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). The design is inspired mainly by Swets et al (2008)'s investigation of parsing preferences for a temporary syntactic ambiguity.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does antecedent complexity affect ellipsis processing? An empirical investigation

Paape

Nicenboim

Vasishth

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the effect of changes in antecedent complexity on processing times for ellipsis. Pointer-or "sharing"-based approaches to ellipsis processing (Frazier & Clifton 2001Martin & McElree 2008) predict no effect of antecedent complexity on reading times at the ellipsis site while other accounts predict increased antecedent complexity to either slow down processing (Murphy 1985) or to speed it up (Hofmeister 2011). Experiment 1 manipulated antecedent complexity and elision, yielding evidence against a speedup at the ellipsis site and in favor of a null effect. In order to investigate possible superficial processing on part of participants, Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of attention required to correctly respond to end-of-sentence comprehension probes, yielding evidence against a complexity-induced slowdown at the ellipsis site. Overall, our results are compatible with pointerbased approaches while casting doubt on the notion that changes antecedent complexity lead to measurable differences in ellipsis processing speed.

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Filling the Silence: Reactivation, not Reconstruction

Cited by 6 publications

References 51 publications

Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking

Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking

A memory-based explanation of antecedent-ellipsis mismatches: New insights from computational modeling

Does antecedent complexity affect ellipsis processing? An empirical investigation

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