Abstract
We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 175-189 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Language, Cognition and Neuroscience |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 28 Oct 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 7 Feb 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Sentence processing
- Structural priming
- Reconstruction
- Anomalous sentences
- Missing verbs
- Language comprehension
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Janet McLean
- Department of Sociological and Psychological Sciences - Reader in Learning Science
Person: Academic