Abstract
Clauses that are parallel in form and meaning show processing advantages in ellipsis and coordination structures (Frazier et al. 1984; Kehler 2000; Carlson 2002). However, the constructions that have been used to show a parallelism advantage do not always require a strong semantic relationship between clauses. We present two eye tracking while reading studies on focus-sensitive coordination structures, an understudied form of ellipsis which requires the generation of a contextually salient semantic relation or scale between conjuncts. However, when the remnant of ellipsis lacks an overt correlate in the matrix clause and must be "sprouted" in the ellipsis site, the relation between clauses is simplified to entailment. Instead of facilitation for sentences with an entailment relation between clauses, our online processing results suggest that violating Parallelism is costly, even when doing so could ease the semantic relations required for interpretation.
Highlights
The online interpretation of ellipsis structures has become a popular topic among psycholinguists because it highlights an intriguing mismatch between form and meaning, and reveals a unique demand on the human sentence processing system
2.3.3 Results We report significant results for several standard eye tracking measures: first pass time, the sum of fixation durations from first entering a region until exiting to the left or right; go past time, the duration from first entering a region to first exiting to the right; second pass time, the time spent re-reading a region after having gone past the region previously; and total time, the sum of all fixations in a region at any point in reading
In the case of go past times, trial position was approximated in terms of first and second halves of the experiment, which resulted in a better model fit
Summary
The online interpretation of ellipsis structures has become a popular topic among psycholinguists because it highlights an intriguing mismatch between form and meaning, and reveals a unique demand on the human sentence processing system. We aim to expand the empirical and conceptual coverage of ellipsis processing by exploring an understudied ellipsis type known as focus-sensitive coordination, which requires a contextually salient scale between contrasting phrases. We use that scale to explore the role of parallelism in the processing of elided structures. There are many types of ellipsis structures, perhaps the most well known case is VP (verb phrase) ellipsis, which we use to illustrate the basic inference problem faced by the human language sentence processor. In (1a) the auxiliary did stands in for the verb phrase ate a cheeseburger, which is made explicit in (1b)
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