The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational
Content
on Sentence Processing
Robert Thornton and Maryellen C. MacDonald
University of Southern California
Jennifer E. Arnold
University of Pennsylvania
Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in
modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we
extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects
that length manipulations exert. The results demonstrate that length
not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also
necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which
itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that
the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints,
both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on
processing.
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