Structure Modulates Similarity-Based Interference in Sluicing: An Eye Tracking study

Correlate not optional: PP sprouting and parallelism in "much less" ellipsis

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.

Information Structure Preferences in Focus-Sensitive Ellipsis: How Defaults Persist

We compare the roles of overt accent and default focus marking in processing ellipsis structures headed by focus-sensitive coordinators (such as Danielle couldn't pass the quiz, let alone the final/Kayla). In a small auditory corpus study of radio transcripts, we establish that such structures overwhelmingly occur with contrastive pitch accents on the correlate and remnant ( the quiz and the final, or Danielle and Kayla), and that there is a strong bias to pair the remnant with the most local plausible correlate in production. In two auditory naturalness ratings experiments, we observe that marking a non-local correlate with contrastive pitch accent moderates, but does not fully overturn, the bias for local correlates in comprehension. We propose that the locality preference is due to a sentence-final default position for sentence accent, and that auditory processing is subject to "enduring focus," in which default positions for focus continue to influence the focus structure of the sentence even in the presence of overt accents. The importance of these results for models of auditory processing and of the processing of remnants in ellipsis structures is discussed.