Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances
Iva Ivanova1, Holly P Branigan2, Janet F McLean2
1Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract:
We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by 'correcting' syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants' syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances - even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.
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