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. 2010 Oct;39(5):411-27.
doi: 10.1007/s10936-010-9148-9.

The real-time processing of sluiced sentences

Josée Poirier  1 , Katie Wolfinger, Lisa Spellman, Lewis P Shapiro
Affiliations

The real-time processing of sluiced sentences

Josée Poirier et al. J Psycholinguist Res. 2010 Oct.

Abstract

Ellipsis refers to an element that is absent from the input but whose meaning can nonetheless be recovered from context. In this cross-modal priming study, we examined the online processing of Sluicing, an ellipsis whose antecedent is an entire clause: The handyman threw a book to the programmer but I don't know which book the handyman threw to the programmer(ellipsis.) To understand such an elliptical construction, the listener arguably must 'fill in' the missing material ("the handyman threw___ to the programmer") based on that which occurs in the antecedent clause. We aimed to determine the point in time in which reconstruction of the sluiced sentence is attempted and whether such a complex antecedent is re-accessed by the ellipsis. Out of the two antecedent constituents for which we probed, only the Object (programmer) was found active in the elliptical clause, confirming that an antecedent is attributed to the sluice in real time. Possible reasons for the non-observation of the Subject (handyman) are considered. We also suggest that ellipses are detected earlier in coordinated than subordinated sentences.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Priming effects (control minus related RTs) for the Subject and the Object at each probe position. * statistically significant effect
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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