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 programmerellipsis. 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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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by NIH-NIDCD DC000494 (Shapiro) as well as by the Sheila and Jeffrey Lipinsky Family Fellowship and the W.O. Dingwall Foundation Fellowship (both to Poirier). The authors thank Dr. Tracy Love for her comments on an earlier manuscript. The authors are also grateful to Roberto Gutierrez and the research assistants for their assistance with data collection.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Poirier, J., Wolfinger, K., Spellman, L. et al. The Real-Time Processing of Sluiced Sentences. J Psycholinguist Res 39, 411–427 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-010-9148-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-010-9148-9