Publication year
2002Source
Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 1, (2002), pp. 99-119ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
Nederlandse Taal en Cultuur
SW OZ DCC CO
Former Organization
SW OZ NICI CO
Journal title
Journal of Memory and Language
Volume
vol. 46
Issue
iss. 1
Page start
p. 99
Page end
p. 119
Subject
PsycholinguisticsAbstract
When a sentence such as The model embraced the designer and the photographer laughed is read, the noun phrase the photographer is temporarily ambiguous: It can be either one of the objects of embraced (NP-coordination) or the subject of a new, conjoined sentence (S-coordination). It has been shown for a number of languages, including Dutch (the language used in this study), that readers prefer NP-coordination over S-coordination, at least in isolated sentences. In the present paper, it will be suggested that NP-coordination is preferred because it is the simpler of the two options in terms of topic-structure; in NP-coordinations there is only one topic, whereas S-coordinations contain two. Results from off-line (sentence completion) and online studies (a self-paced reading and an eye tracking experiment) support this topic-structure explanation. The processing difficulty associated with S-coordinated sentences disappeared when these sentences followed contexts favoring a two-topic continuation. This finding establishes topic-structure as an important factor in online sentence processing.
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- Faculty of Social Sciences [27108]
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