The proposed research extends our existing work on the parsing of sentences to topics in sentence-interpretation. We concentrate on the processing of elliptical constructions, asking questions about how ellipses are interpreted and about the roles that focus, presupposition, processing domains, and prosody play in interpreting elliptical sentences. The immediate goal of the research is to explore how normal adult readers and listeners go beyond the process of perceiving the structure of sentences to constructing a semantic interpretation of a sentence and integrating it with discourse. Its health-related implications are long-term but substantial. Just as advances in psycholinguistic theory over the past two decades have had substantial impact on our understanding of language disorders, most notably aphasia, we expect that a better understanding of the processing of elliptical sentences and the integration of such sentences with discourse will lead to better understanding of the limitations of language use in aphasia. We propose a variety of on-line and off-line experiments to determine readers' and listeners' initial interpretations of ambiguous sentences and to determine the difficulty of comprehending unambiguous sentences with different structures. Our experiments treat a fairly wide range of topics involved in the interpretation of elliptical sentences, including the effects of the structure of the antecedent of an ellipsis, the effects of processing domains, and the effects of focus and other semantic factors. These topics are integrated by explicit hypotheses that we propose, including the copy-alpha proposal and the conjunction principle, together with claims about how a reader or listener aligns corresponding phrases of one or more sentences in the process of filling in ellipses.
| Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2016) Accommodation to an Unlikely Episodic State. J Mem Lang 86:20-34 |
| Frazier, Lyn (2015) Two interpretive systems for natural language? J Psycholinguist Res 44:7-25 |
| Frazier, Lyn (2015) Do Null Subjects (mis-)Trigger Pro-drop Grammars? J Psycholinguist Res 44:669-74 |
| Frazier, Lyn; Clifton Jr, Charles (2015) Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: interpreting an uncertain input. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:635-647 |
| Frazier, Lyn; Clifton Jr, Charles; Carlson, Katy et al. (2014) Standing alone with prosodic help. Lang Cogn Process 29:459-469 |
| Benatar, Ashley; Clifton Jr, Charles (2014) Newness, Givenness and Discourse Updating: Evidence from Eye Movements. J Mem Lang 71: |
| Dillon, Brian; Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2014) Pushed aside: Parentheticals, Memory and Processing. Lang Cogn Neurosci 29:483-498 |
| Harris, Jesse A; Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2013) Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects. Lang Cogn Process 28:1519-1544 |
| Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2013) Partition if You Must: Evidence for a No Extra Times Principle. Discourse Process 50: |
| Breen, Mara; Clifton Jr, Charles (2013) Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 66:1896-909 |
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