The Effects of Parallelism and Prosody in the Processing of Gapping Structures

Two studies explored the processing of ambiguous sentences like Bill took chips to the party and Susan to the game, which may be assigned a gapping (Susan took chips) or a nongapping structure (Bill took Susan). The central question was what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a written questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments in the positions of Bill and Susan received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the non gapping structure was seen. An auditory comprehension study showed that prosodic parallels between arguments also affected interpretation. In both experiments parallelism played a significant role in determiningan interpretation, but the simpler structure, the nongapping structure, was preferred overall.

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