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Updated: Jul 14, 2026

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets
Published on: December 5, 2014
Focus and VP ellipsis
Lyn Frazier1, Charles Clifton, Katy Carlson
1Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA. lyn@linguist.umass.edu
Abstract:
In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing its likelihood of contrasting with the subject of the elided clause. The results of Experiment 1 supported the predictions of this "Contrasted Remnant hypothesis" but in principle could also be caused by listeners avoiding antecedents containing a focused (F-marked) constituent. Experiment 2 disconfirmed the hypothesis that listeners avoid antecedents containing a focused constituent, although pitch accents within a potential antecedent VP affected ellipsis resolution.
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