Fill the gap! Combining pragmatic and prosodic information to make gapping easy

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Ambiguous sentences pose challenges for language comprehension.
• The 'gapping' and 'nongapping' readings of sentences like 'John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today' illustrate this ambiguity.
• Understanding how context and prosody affect interpretation is crucial for psycholinguistic models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of prosody and pragmatic context on sentence processing.
• To determine the effects on both immediate (on-line) and later (off-line) interpretation.
• To explore how these factors influence the processing of ambiguous grammatical structures.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted involving auditory presentation of dialogues and ambiguous sentences.
• Participants provided speeded responses indicating their initial interpretation (on-line processing).
• A second experiment included a visual probe task during sentence presentation to further analyze processing.

Main Results:

• Prosody and pragmatic context independently and significantly affected sentence interpretation.
• Both on-line and off-line processing of the 'gapping' reading were influenced by these factors.
• A favorable combination of context and prosody rendered the 'gapping' reading as accessible as the 'nongapping' reading.

Conclusions:

• Prosody and context are powerful cues in resolving linguistic ambiguity.
• The interplay between prosody and context can override typical processing preferences.
• This research provides insights into the dynamic nature of sentence comprehension and ambiguity resolution.