Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension

Abstract

In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.

Keywords:

• Sentence processing
• Prosody
• Information structure
• Ellipsis
• Sluicing

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by Kentucky NSF EPSCoR (National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) REG Grant EPS-0132295, NIH (National Institutes of Health) Grant R01-DC01948, and NSF Grant BCS-0090674. The authors are grateful to Manfred Krifka and Jason Merchant for their comments on this work.

Notes

¹The change from indefinite to definite sluice was made for several reasons: to explore the generality of the Frazier and Clifton (1998) findings, to permit more flexibility in identifying the inner antecedent of a sluice (since definite noun phrases can serve that function), and to begin to explore the possibility that the effect of focus and accent would be more substantial in definite sluices, which can be considered to be contrastive.

²The sentences in this study contained direct objects and following PPs, as in the indefinite sluicing sentences of Experiment 4. Interestingly, another finding was that sentences with focus on the object were produced 38% of the time with nuclear pitch accents within the PP (while in the PP-focus condition, 94% of sentences had nuclear accent within the PP). This supports our contention that there may be a preference to assign focus or pitch accents to the lowest/latest constituents in a sentence, though Cohan suggests it is a phonological constraint.