Fill the Gap! Combining Pragmatic and ProsodicInformation to Make Gapping Easy

摘要

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-lineand on-line processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. Suchsentences are ambiguous between the so-called `nongapping' reading, where John greetedBen, and the highly unpreferred 'gapping' reading, where Ben greeted Paul. In the first exper-iment, participants listened to dialogues and gave a speeded response as to which readingof an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. In the second experiment, they alsoresponded to a visual probe that was presented during the presentation of the ambiguoustarget. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects onboth on-line processing and off-line interpretation of gapping; in the right combination theycan make gapping as easy as the normally preferred nongapping reading.