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

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 represent...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-06, Vol.13 (6), p.e0198620-e0198620
Main Authors: Paape, Dario, Hemforth, Barbara, Vasishth, Shravan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activation
Adult
Ambiguity
Analysis
Antecedent (Logic)
Biology and Life Sciences
Comparative analysis
Computer and Information Sciences
Ellipsis
Engineering and Technology
Experimental psychology
Eye Movements - physiology
France
French language
German language
Germany
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Language
Linguistics
Memory
Multivariate analysis
Photic Stimulation
Reading
Reading comprehension
Research and Analysis Methods
Semantics
Sentence structure
Sentences
Social Sciences
Tracking
Young Adult
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0198620