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Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension.

Katy Carlson1, Michael Walsh Dickey, Lyn Frazier

  • 1Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY 40351, USA. k.carlson@morehead-st.edu

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|July 9, 2008
PubMed
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Readers expect sentence focus to appear late, influencing comprehension of ellipsis sentences. This bias, though strong, can be altered by prosody or syntax.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Sentence Comprehension
  • Information Structure

Background:

  • English sentence structure often places new information and primary accent at the end.
  • This tendency creates an expectation for informational focus to occur in final sentence constituents.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how sentence-final information expectation influences the comprehension of focus-sensitive constructions, specifically ellipsis sentences.
  • To determine the role of prosodic and syntactic cues in overriding this expectation.

Main Methods:

  • Four experiments were conducted using sluicing sentences.
  • Manipulated prosodic information (pitch accents) and syntactic information (clefted sentences) to test focus placement.
  • Investigated antecedent preferences in ellipsis resolution.

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Main Results:

  • Participants showed a preference for late-sentence focus, aligning with typical English information structure.
  • This preference was significantly mitigated by explicit prosodic (pitch accents) and syntactic (clefting) focus markers.
  • Informationally focused constituents, not just direct objects, were preferred antecedents in ellipsis resolution.

Conclusions:

  • Sentence comprehension is influenced by expectations about information structure, particularly the tendency for focus to appear late.
  • These expectations are partially cancellable by overt focus markers, but persistent biases in ellipsis resolution may remain.
  • Understanding information structure expectations is key to explaining biases in processing complex sentence constructions.