Prosody, context, and thematic fit meet “Gapping”: The interaction of multiple constraints in spoken sentence comprehension.

Prosody, Context, and Thematic Fit meet “Gapping”: The Interaction of Multiple Constraints in Spoken Sentence Comprehension John C. J. Hoeks (j.c.j.hoeks@rug.nl) Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, PO Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands. Petra Hendriks (p.hendriks@rug.nl) Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, PO Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands. Gisela Redeker (g.redeker@rug.nl) Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, PO Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands. Abstract In this sentence it is impossible to uniquely identify which elements were left out; the sentence is ambiguous between reading (1b), where first John greets Paul, and then Ben greets Paul, and reading (1c), where John greeted both Paul and Ben. We will follow linguistic convention and call the first form of ellipsis, where verb and grammatical object are elided 'gapping' (1b) and the second one 'conjunction reduction', or 'nongapping' (1c). Two studies investigated the effects of prosody, context and thematic fit on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called 'nongapping' reading, where John greeted Ben, and the highly unpreferred 'gapping' reading, where Ben greeted Paul. Participants listen to dialogues and give a speeded response as to which reading of an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. In addition, they respond to a visual probe that is presented during the presentation of the ambiguous target. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects on both on-line processing and off-line interpretation, even if they are countered by thematic fit information. Why is Gapping so Hard? Keywords: Psycholinguistics; Cross-Modal Gender Decision; Prosody; Pragmatics; Thematic Fit; Gapping. Introduction The language faculty is one of the most complex cognitive systems that we know of. This complexity arises from the stunning number of sources of information - that also are very different in nature - that have to be dealt with. Language production and comprehension require the integration of information about structure (syntax), about meaning and meaning combination (semantics), about the order (and sometimes morphology) of sentence elements in a sentence (information structure), about how the sentence fits into the linguistic and nonlinguistic context (pragmatics), not to mention factors such as prosody and visual scene information. Information coming from all of these sources has to be analyzed and integrated in order to succesfully utter a sentence or comprehend a message. The linguistic phenomenon of gapping is - par excellence - an instance where many of these constraints are involved. Gapping is actually a form of ellipsis, where words or phrases are left out of an utterance without changing its formal meaning. Most of the time, ellipsis is associated with ease of processing, but gapping appears to be a special case in this respect. Consider, for instance, sentence (1a). 1a. John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. 1b. John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben greeted Paul today. 1c. John greeted Paul yesterday and John greeted Ben today. In earlier studies it has been noted that it can be very hard for listeners to arrive at the gapping interpretation of an ambiguous sentence; indeed, the nongapping version seems to be highly preferred. For instance, Carlson (2001) showed in a written questionnaire study that in ambiguous sentences very similar to (1a), gapping interpretations are chosen only 4% of the time. Manipulation of the semantic parallelism between the entities in the sentence did lead to an increase in the number of gapping interpretations in sentences such as John visited the office yesterday and Ben today , but only to 40%. Carlson (2001) suggested that the major force resisting gapping was the well-known Minimal Attachment Principle: choose the simplest syntactic structure in terms of nodes of the respective syntactic trees (Frazier, 1987). Because nongapping is syntactically less complex (i.e., its syntactic description contains fewer nodes), it should for that reason be the preferred option in case of ambiguity. Gapping only becomes the option of choice when thematic fit information is brought into play, as in John baked cookies for his parents and Ben for his grandparents , where the nongapping interpretation is practically excluded. Here, 81% of instances received a gapping response, because the nongapping interpretation (i.e., John baked Ben) is highly implausible (Carlson, 2001). Gapping and Prosody In a follow-up experiment using auditory stimuli, Carlson (2001) manipulated the prosody of the ambiguous sentences, to either bias towards the gapping or towards the nongapping interpretation. Bias was accomplished by making use of the fact that placement of pitch accent correlates strongly with the presence of new or contrastive