Constituent order and semantic parallelism in online comprehension: Eye-tracking evidence from German

Abstract

Reading times for the second conjunct of and-coordinated clauses are faster when the second conjunct parallels the first conjunct in its syntactic or semantic (animacy) structure than when its structure differs (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Frazier, Taft, Roeper, & Clifton, 1984). What remains unclear, however, is the time course of parallelism effects, their scope, and the kinds of linguistic information to which they are sensitive. Findings from the first two eye-tracking experiments revealed incremental constituent order parallelism across the board—both during structural disambiguation (Experiment 1) and in sentences with unambiguously case-marked constituent order (Experiment 2), as well as for both marked and unmarked constituent orders (Experiments 1 and 2). Findings from Experiment 3 revealed effects of both constituent order and subtle semantic (noun phrase similarity) parallelism. Together our findings provide evidence for an across-the-board account of parallelism for processing and-coordinated clauses, in which both constituent order and semantic aspects of representations contribute towards incremental parallelism effects. We discuss our findings in the context of existing findings on parallelism and priming, as well as mechanisms of sentence processing.

Keywords:

• Psycholinguistics
• Sentence processing
• Syntactic coordination
• Constituent order
• Semantic parallelism
• Eye tracking

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Grant CR 135/1–2 awarded to the second author by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We thank Patrick Sturt for his advice. The present studies were conducted while the first author was in the Department of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University, Germany.