Interpreting Adjuncts: Processing English As-Clauses.

Four experiments probed the interpretation of sentence-final as-clauses (e.g., Close the book as a librarian would/would do) ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a "propositional" interpretation. Experiment 1, an interpretation study, found a predominance of manner interpretations for sentences containing would and would do as the elliptical predicate inside the as-clause, biased by which form participants were initially exposed to. In Experiment 2, we assumed that a comma may be present before the as-clause for both interpretations, but that when the contrast between a comma and no comma is called to the reader's attention it will favor the propositional interpretation. The expectation was confirmed. In Experiment 3 a would-sentence was preceded by a How question or by a What's with question: propositional interpretations were rare but more prevalent following the What's with question than the manner question. Experiment 4 added a What did question and tested both no-comma would (NoComma) sentences and comma would do (CommaDo) sentences. CommaDo sentences received more propositional interpretations than NoComma sentences, and were read faster following the What's with question than the How question, whereas the NoComma were read faster after the How question. All four studies showed manner interpretations prevail, though would do, a (contrastive) comma or a non-manner question increase the frequency of propositional interpretations. Two possibilities are considered for what underlies the manner preference: a general preference for an adjunct to be part of the event description in cases of ambiguity, or the availability of a pre-existing event-"slot" for manner. The reading time results favor the former possibility.

The prosodic accent advantage in phoneme detection: Importance of local context.

Previous research (e.g., Cutler, Perception & Psychophysics, 20, 55-60, 1976) has shown that detection of the initial phoneme of a word is speeded when the word is pronounced with a focal accent. This "accent advantage" is also observed when the accented word is replaced by a neutrally accented one. The present two experiments were designed to identify what aspect of the context preceding the target word is the source of this advantage. Both indicated that the advantage can be ascribed to the syllable immediately preceding the target word, rather than some possibly global but more distal attribute of the context. The first experiment used the recordings that had been used by Cutler Perception & Psychophysics, 20, 55-60, (1976) with the addition of a between-subjects manipulation of the local context. In one condition, the syllable immediately before the target word was the one that had been recorded in the sentence context (preceding an accented or an unaccented target word). In the other, cross-spliced, condition, the preceding syllable was exchanged between accented and unaccented contexts. The second (pre-registered) experiment used new recordings and a within-subject manipulation of the pre-target syllable. The studies confirmed and extended the observation that the pre-target syllable rather than some other prosodic aspect of the preceding context is the source of the faster phoneme detections.

Negative clauses imply affirmative topics and affirmative antecedents.

We propose that negative clauses are generally interpreted as if the affirmative portion of the clause is under discussion, a likely topic. This predicts a preference for affirmative (topical) antecedents over negative antecedents of a following missing verb phrase (VP). Three experiments tested the predictions of this hypothesis in sentences containing negation in the first clause followed by an ambiguous as-clause as in Don't cross on red as a stupid person would and its counterpart with smart replacing stupid. In Experiment 1 sentences containing an undesirable attribute adjective such as stupid were rated as more natural, and read faster, than their desirable attribute counterparts (smart), with or without a comma preceding as. The second experiment indicated that the interpretation of the missing VP reflected the attribute adjective's desirability, with processing difficulty presumably reflecting reanalysis from the initial affirmative antecedent (cross on red) to include negation when the initial interpretation violated plausibility. A third experiment generalized the effect beyond sentences with an initial contracted don't.

Preceding syllables are necessary for the accent advantage effect.

The accent advantage effect in phoneme monitoring-faster responses to a target phoneme at the beginning of an L + H*-accented word than to a target phoneme at the beginning of an unaccented word-is viewed as a product of listeners' predictive capabilities [Cutler (1976). Percept. Psychophys. 20(1), 55-60]. However, previous studies have not established what information listeners use to form these predictions [Cutler (1987). Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 84-87; Cutler and Darwin (1981). Percept. Psychophys. 29(3), 217-224]. This article presents evidence that at least the information in the syllable immediately preceding a target phoneme is necessary to cue the predictive attention allocation that underlies the accent advantage effect.

Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A Note on the Voice Mismatch Asymmetry in Ellipsis.

Theories of ellipsis differ in the identity condition claimed to hold between an antecedent and an elided constituent. A syntactic identity condition leads to the prediction that syntactic mismatches between an antecedent and elided constituent should give rise to a penalty, and that penalty should be greater than in corresponding examples without ellipsis. Further, if syntactic mismatches are ungrammatical, violating the syntactic identity condition, then in effect they are speech errors and would be expected to be rated higher when a passive clause antecedes an active elided VP than vice versa because people misremember passives as actives more often the reverse. A written acceptability judgment study crossed the voice of the antecedent clause (active/passive), the voice of the ellipsis clause (active/passive) and ellipsis/non-ellipsis in the final clause. Results indicate a syntactic mismatch lowers acceptability in examples with elided VPs but not examples with overt VPs, as predicted by theories with a syntactic identity condition. Passive-active mismatches were rated better than active-passive ones, especially with ellipsis, as predicted by a speech error/repair approach to mismatches. This result eliminates any concern that the appearance of a voice asymmetry might only be due to some incompatibility between VP ellipsis and passive voice.

Evaluation of the epistemic state of the speaker/author.

Language users are sensitive to their language's grammatical requirements, the plausibility of the situation described and the information shared by speaker and listener. We propose that they are also sensitive to whether an author is likely to be in a state of knowledge that actually supports the assertion being made. Failure to be in such a state reduces the naturalness of the assertion. Consistent with this proposal, sentences with a disjoined noun phrase are judged to be less natural than their conjunctive counterparts, presumably because the author of a disjunctive sentence must know that an event took place but not know which of the two individuals was the agent. This unlikely state of knowledge reduces the naturalness of the sentence. The results of three experiments indicate that providing evidence that the speaker could be in an unlikely epistemic state reduces the disjunction penalty; a fourth extends the demonstration of the penalty from coordinated noun phrases to coordinated verb phrases. We also present one experiment that explores the possibility that disjunction penalty is due to the unexpectedness of a disjunction. These findings demonstrate that language users evaluate linguistic input in light of the epistemic state of its author.

Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content.

Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue' (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypothesis leads us to expect the semantic properties Potts established. We present experimental confirmation of two intuitive observations made by Potts: first that speech act adverbs should be acceptable as NAI content, supporting the speech act hypothesis; and second, that when two speech acts are expressed as successive sentences, the comprehender assumes they are related by some discourse coherence relation, whereas an NAI speech act need not bear a restrictive discourse coherence relation to its containing utterance, though overall sentences containing relevant content are rated more acceptable than those that do not. The speech act hypothesis accounts for these effects, and further accounts for why judgments of syntactic complexity or evaluations of whether or not a statement is true interact with the at-issue status of the material being judged or evaluated.

The Matrix Verb as a Source of Comprehension Difficulty in Object Relative Sentences.

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is entirely eliminated if additional material intervenes between the object gap and the matrix verb. An explanation in terms of spillover processing is ruled out, suggesting that it is the gap-matrix verb sequence that is itself responsible for the difficulty. We consider two accounts of this difficulty, one emphasizing the potential difficulty of rapidly switching between the sentential subject's thematic or syntactic role in the embedded clause and its role in the matrix clause, and one emphasizing the potential difficulty of performing two demanding memory retrievals in rapid succession. The present experiments also closely replicate the previous findings from eyetracking that the noun phrase and the verb within an object relative are both loci of processing difficulty, but that the former induces substantially greater difficulty.

Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form.

A dialog consisting of an utterance by one speaker and another speaker's correction of its content seems intuitively to be made more acceptable when the new information is pitch accented or otherwise focused, and when the utterance and correction have the same syntactic form. Three acceptability judgment studies, one written and two auditory, investigated the interaction of focus (manipulated by sentence position and, in Experiments 2 and 3, pitch accent) and syntactic parallelism. Experiment 1 indicated that syntactic parallelism interacted with position of the new (contrastive) term: nonparallel forms were relatively acceptable when the new term appeared in object position, a position that commonly contains new information (a 'default focus' position). Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that presence of a pitch accent and placement in a default focus position had additive effects on acceptability. Surprisingly, spoken dialogs in which the new term appeared in object position were acceptable even when given information carried the most prominent pitch accent. The present studies, and earlier work, suggest that corrected information can be focused either by prosody or position even in spoken English-a language often thought to express focus through pitch accent, not syntactic position.

Accommodation to an Unlikely Episodic State.

Mini-discourses like (ia) seem slightly odd compared to their counterparts containing a conjunction (ib). (i) a. Speaker A: John or Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. b. Speaker A: John and Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. One possibility is that or in Speaker A's utterance in (ia) raises the potential Question Under Discussion (QUD) whether it was John or Bill who left and Speaker B's reply fails to address this QUD. A different possibility is that the epistemic state of the speaker of (ia) is somewhat unlikely or uneven: the speaker knows that someone left, and that it was John or Bill, but doesn't know which one. The results of four acceptability judgment studies confirmed that (ia) is less good or coherent than (ib) (Experiment 1), but not due to failure to address the QUD implicitly introduced by the disjunction because the penalty for disjunction persisted even in the presence of a different overt QUD (Experiment 2) and even when there was no reply to Speaker A (Experiment 3). The hypothesis that accommodating an unusual epistemic state might underlie the lower acceptability of disjunction was supported by the fact that the disjunction penalty is larger in past tense discourses than in future discourses, where partial knowledge of events is the norm (Experiment 4). The results of an eye tracking study revealed a penalty for disjunction relative to conjunction that was significantly smaller when a lead in (I wonder if it was…) explicitly introduced the disjunction. This interaction (connective X lead in) appeared in early measures on the disjunctive phrase itself, suggesting that the input is related to an inferred epistemic state of the speaker in a rapid and ongoing fashion.

Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: interpreting an uncertain input.

Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are "familiar", i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclusion of almost in A passerby rescued a child from almost being run over by a bus.), to a majority of unblended interpretations for doubled quantifier sentences (Many students often turn in their assignments late) to only a third undoubled implicit negation (I just like the way the president looks without his shirt off.) The repair or speech error reversal account offered here is contrasted with the noisy channel approach (Gibson et al., 2013) and the good enough processing approach (Ferreiera et al., 2002).

Pushed aside: Parentheticals, Memory and Processing.

In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' content (Potts, 2005) are processed semi-independently. In a written rating study comparing restrictive relative clauses and parentheticals in interrogatives and declaratives, we observe a significantly larger length penalty for restrictive relative clauses than for parentheticals. This difference cannot be attributed to differences in how listeners allocate attention across a sentence: a second study confirms that readers are equally sensitive to agreement violations in at-issue and not-at-issue content. A third rating experiment showed that the results do not depend on the restrictive relative clause intervening on the subject-verb dependency. A final experiment showed that the observed effects obtain with definite determiners and demonstratives alike. Taken jointly the results suggest that the parenthetical structures are processed independently of their embedding utterance, which in turn suggests that syntactic memory may be more differentiated than is typically assumed.

Standing alone with prosodic help.

Two partially independent issues are addressed in two auditory rating studies: under what circumstances is a sub-string of a sentence identified as a stand-alone sentence, and under what circumstances do globally ill-formed but 'locally coherent' analyses (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson., 2004) emerge? A new type of locally coherent structure is established in Experiment 1, where a that-less complement clause is at least temporarily analyzed as a stand-alone sentence when it corresponds to a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, reduced relative clause structures like those in Tabor et al. were investigated. As in Experiment 1, the root sentence (mis-)analyses emerged most frequently when the locally coherent clause corresponded to a prosodic phrase. However, a substantial number of locally coherent analyses emerged even without prosodic help, especially in examples with for-datives (which do not grammatically permit a reduced relative clause structure for some speakers). Overall, the results suggest that prosodic grouping of constituents encourages analysis of a sub-string as a root sentence, and raise the question of whether all local coherence structures involve analysis of an utterance-final sub-string as a root sentence.

Newness, Givenness and Discourse Updating: Evidence from Eye Movements.

Three experiments examined the effect of contextual givenness on eye movements in reading, following Schwarzschild's (1999) analysis of givenness and focus-marking in which relations among entities as well as the entities themselves can be given. In each study, a context question was followed by an answer in which a critical word was either given, new, or contrastively (correctively) focused. Target words were read faster when the critical word provided given information than when it provided new information, and faster when it provided new information than when it corrected prior information. Repetition of target words was controlled in two ways: by mentioning a non-given target word in the context in a relation other than that in which it occurred as a target, and by using a synonym or subordinate of a given target to refer to it in the context question. Verbatim repetition was not responsible for the observed effects of givenness and contrastiveness. Besides clarifying previous inconsistent results of the effects of focus and givenness on reading speed, these results indicate that reading speed can be influenced essentially immediately by a reader's discourse representation, and that the extent of the influence is graded, with corrections to a representation having a larger effect than simple additions.

Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment.

Breen and Clifton (Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 2011, 64, 153-170) argued that readers' eye movements during silent reading are influenced by the stress patterns of words. This claim was supported by the observation that syntactic reanalysis that required concurrent metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of abstract to the verb form) resulted in longer reading times than syntactic reanalysis that did not require metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of report to the verb form). However, the data contained a puzzle: The disruption appeared on the critical word (abstract, report) itself, although the material that forced the part of speech change did not appear until the next region. Breen and Clifton argued that parafoveal preview of the disambiguating material triggered the revision and that the eyes did not move on until a fully specified lexical representation of the critical word was achieved. The present experiment used a boundary change paradigm in which parafoveal preview of the disambiguating region was prevented. Once again, an interaction was observed: Syntactic reanalysis resulted in particularly long reading times when it also required metrical reanalysis. However, now the interaction did not appear on the critical word, but only following the disambiguating region. This pattern of results supports Breen and Clifton's claim that readers form an implicit metrical representation of text during silent reading.

Situational context affects definiteness preferences: accommodation of presuppositions.

In 4 experiments, we used self-paced reading and eye tracking to demonstrate that readers are, under some conditions, sensitive to the presuppositions of definite versus indefinite determiner phrases (DPs). Reading was faster when the context stereotypically provided a single possible referent for a definite DP or multiple possible referents for an indefinite DP than when context and DP definiteness were mismatched. This finding goes beyond previous evidence that definite DPs are processed more rapidly than are indefinite DPs when there is a unique or familiar referent in the context, showing that readers are sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of (in)definiteness. However, the finding was obtained only when readers had to perform a simple arithmetic task between reading a sentence and seeing a question about it. The intervening task may have encouraged them to process the sentence more deeply in order to form a representation that would persist while doing the arithmetic. The methodological implications of this observation are discussed.

Partition if You Must: Evidence for a No Extra Times Principle.

Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which subsets of the kids do different things, or it might involve quantifying over distinct scenarios, in which all of the kids do one thing or all of them do the other. In the present work and related earlier work (Harris et al., 2013), we pursue the No Extra Times principle that favors interpretations where a phrase is construed as describing a single event taking place during a given time period. In two written interpretation studies, we found that participants more often interpret indeterminate sentences with disjunctive predicates by partitioning the set of individuals rather than partitioning the predicate to denote distinct scenarios or times. We conclude by offering some speculations about why partitioning the eventuality denoted by the verb phrase into multiple times is more costly than partitioning the entities denoted by its subject noun phrase into multiple sets.