The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval

Nayoun Kim; Laurel Brehm; Masaya Yoshida

doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1513542

The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval

Nayoun Kim^*, Laurel Brehm, Masaya Yoshida

^*Corresponding author for this work

Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate whether grammatical information is accessed in processing noun phrase ellipsis (NPE) and other anaphoric constructions. The first experiment used an agreement attraction paradigm to reveal that ungrammatical plural verbs following NPE with an antecedent containing a plural modifier (e.g. Derek’s key to the boxes … and Mary’s_ probably *are safe in the drawer) show similar facilitation to non-elided NPs. The second experiment used the same paradigm to examine a coordination construction without anaphoric elements, and the third examined anaphoric one. Agreement attraction was not observed in either experiment, suggesting that processing NPE is different from processing non-anaphoric coordination constructions or anaphoric one. Taken together, the results indicate that the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site where it prioritises and retrieves the head at the initial stage of processing and retrieves the local noun within the modifier phrase only when it is necessary in parsing NPE.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	190-213
Number of pages	24
Journal	Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
Volume	34
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1513542
State	Published - Feb 7 2019

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation [grant number NSF BCS-1323245, NSF DDRI Grant: BCS-1749580]. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and comments. We would like to also thank Brian Dillon, Matt Goldrick, Alex Krauska, Dave Kush, Ellen Lau, Akira Omaki, Colin Phillips, Shayne Sloggett, Patrick Sturt, Matt Wagers, Alexis Wellwood, members at Syntax, Semantics and Sentence Processing Lab at Northwestern, and the audiences at the CUNY2016, AMLaP2016, CUNY2017 and the 90th annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America for their invaluable discussions and comments. This work has been supported in part by NSF DDRI Grant: BCS-1749580. This work was supported by National Science Foundation [grant number NSF BCS-1323245, NSF DDRI Grant: BCS-1749580].

Keywords

Noun phrase ellipsis
agreement attraction
antecedent retrieval
sentence processing
syntax

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Cognitive Neuroscience

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10.1080/23273798.2018.1513542

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title = "The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval",

abstract = "We investigate whether grammatical information is accessed in processing noun phrase ellipsis (NPE) and other anaphoric constructions. The first experiment used an agreement attraction paradigm to reveal that ungrammatical plural verbs following NPE with an antecedent containing a plural modifier (e.g. Derek{\textquoteright}s key to the boxes … and Mary{\textquoteright}s_ probably *are safe in the drawer) show similar facilitation to non-elided NPs. The second experiment used the same paradigm to examine a coordination construction without anaphoric elements, and the third examined anaphoric one. Agreement attraction was not observed in either experiment, suggesting that processing NPE is different from processing non-anaphoric coordination constructions or anaphoric one. Taken together, the results indicate that the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site where it prioritises and retrieves the head at the initial stage of processing and retrieves the local noun within the modifier phrase only when it is necessary in parsing NPE.",

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N2 - We investigate whether grammatical information is accessed in processing noun phrase ellipsis (NPE) and other anaphoric constructions. The first experiment used an agreement attraction paradigm to reveal that ungrammatical plural verbs following NPE with an antecedent containing a plural modifier (e.g. Derek’s key to the boxes … and Mary’s_ probably *are safe in the drawer) show similar facilitation to non-elided NPs. The second experiment used the same paradigm to examine a coordination construction without anaphoric elements, and the third examined anaphoric one. Agreement attraction was not observed in either experiment, suggesting that processing NPE is different from processing non-anaphoric coordination constructions or anaphoric one. Taken together, the results indicate that the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site where it prioritises and retrieves the head at the initial stage of processing and retrieves the local noun within the modifier phrase only when it is necessary in parsing NPE.

AB - We investigate whether grammatical information is accessed in processing noun phrase ellipsis (NPE) and other anaphoric constructions. The first experiment used an agreement attraction paradigm to reveal that ungrammatical plural verbs following NPE with an antecedent containing a plural modifier (e.g. Derek’s key to the boxes … and Mary’s_ probably *are safe in the drawer) show similar facilitation to non-elided NPs. The second experiment used the same paradigm to examine a coordination construction without anaphoric elements, and the third examined anaphoric one. Agreement attraction was not observed in either experiment, suggesting that processing NPE is different from processing non-anaphoric coordination constructions or anaphoric one. Taken together, the results indicate that the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site where it prioritises and retrieves the head at the initial stage of processing and retrieves the local noun within the modifier phrase only when it is necessary in parsing NPE.

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The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval

Abstract

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