Processing the not-because ambiguity in English: The role of pragmatics and prosody
Item
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Title
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Processing the not-because ambiguity in English: The role of pragmatics and prosody
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:020c686228d2:10116
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identifier
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10151
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Creator
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Koizumi, Yukiko,
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Contributor
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Janet Dean Fodor
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Linguistics | ambiguity | not-because | pragmatics | prosody | psycholinguistics | sentence processing
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Abstract
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This dissertation investigates the processing of not-because sentences in English (e.g. Jane didn't purchase the blouse because it was silk), which are scopally ambiguous between BEC>NOT (Jane did not buy it) and NOT>BEC (Jane bought it for some other reason) readings. Frazier and Clifton (1996) had found a strong dispreference for NOT>BEC, which could be attributed to high attachment of the because -clause outside the scope of negation, in conflict with an otherwise very general processing tendency to attach incoming constituents low. The present study was designed to evaluate the possibility that no adjustment of the parsing model is necessitated, because the NOT>BEC reading has marked prosodic and pragmatic properties which would not be anticipated by the parser without substantial contextual support.;In two self-paced reading experiments, disambiguated target constructions were presented either as main clauses or embedded in if-clauses. If-subordination was hypothesized to neutralize the marked prosodic and pragmatic properties of NOT>BEC by (a) suppressing a prosodic boundary before because; and (b) reducing perceived 'incompleteness' by guaranteeing that another clause would follow. In Experiment 1, significantly slower processing occurred for NOT>BEC than BEC>NOT targets in main clauses, replicating previous results, but no processing time difference was evident when the not-because construction was embedded within an if-clause.;Experiment 2 followed to separate the two factors, assessing the contribution of prosody alone. All details of Experiment 1 were maintained except that the not-because construction displayed on a single line in Experiment 1 was now distributed over two lines. The line-break inserted before because was expected to encourage a prosodic break there, due to readers' tendency to interpret visual display segmentations as prosodic breaks, thus favoring BEC>NOT. The reading time data confirmed this, showing no sign of the if-subordination amelioration observed in Experiment 1. Thus, Experiment 2 confirms that prosody is a crucial contributor to the usual difficulty of NOT>BEC.;A general conclusion is that standard parsing strategies are not falsified by not-because, but may be overridden by its unusual linguistic properties.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
