A Strategy for Looking For Effects of Discourse on Sentence Comprehension Look for effects of discourse context by making sentence require something from discourse to make it comprehensible The businessmen loaned money at low interest … Only businessmen loaned money at low interest … … were told to record their expenses. Focus Operators like “only” require some contrast set (Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1996; Sedivy, 2002) Postnominal modification provides implicit contrast set Will that make Reduced Relative sentences easier to understand?

Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler (1996) Stimuli The businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report … Only businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report … “Only”- version read faster at disambiguation “were told” Adding a prenominal adjective made it hard again Only wealthy businessmen loaned money at low interest were told … When no discourse context (and no prosody), - “only” wants some kind of noun modification that points to a contrast set But, several others have failed to replicate these results

Sedivy (2002) Goals –Replicate Ni et al.’s results –Manipulate focus operator ( only ) and NP definiteness separately (confounded in Ni et al.) –Add discourse context manipulations –Determine whether focus operator + discourse manipulations affects processing of sentences that end with the structure preferred by GP Model Frazier’s (1995) challenge

Experiment 1 - Stimuli Definite No Focus The businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report.. Definite Focus Only the businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report.. Indefinite No Focus Businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report.. Indefinite Focus Only businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to report.. Unambiguous controls used morphologically unambiguous verbs like “taken”

Experiment 1 – Procedure & Design Self-paced moving window reading Comprehension Qs after ~1/3 of trials 24 experimental item sets (6/cond/subj) 16 unambiguous control item sets (4/cond/subj) 56 fillers w/ various other structures 48 participants

Experiment 1 – Results Def Foc Indef Foc Def No-Foc Indef No-Foc … loaned money at low interest were told Slower at “loaned money” when preceded by “only” - Because “only” boosts Reduced Rel possibility, leading to competition between RR and Main Verb possibilities? - Or because doing work there to set up contrast set? Faster at “were told” when preceded by “only” - Confirms that there’s a Reduced Relative and thus postnominal modification that supplies an implicit contrast set

Experiment 1 – Results cont’d NO significant differences among conditions in Unambiguous sentences - So, longer RT in Ambig condition not JUST due to work required to set up contrast set - However, similar but weaker similar pattern of means in Unambiguous sentences suggests SOME of the effect in Ambiguous Sentences may be due to that No effects of definiteness, so dropping that manipulation in following studies

Experiment 2 Added 1-sentence contexts that did or did not provide a contrast set Contrast All of the secretaries and accountants were made to take a … No-contrast All of the secretaries in the company were made to take a … Both RR and Main Verb target sentences Only the secretaries prepared for the exam passed and earned … Only the secretaries prepared for the exam and earned … All experimental items begin with “only”

Experiment 2 – Results Main V Contrast Main V No Contr RR Contrast RR No Contr … for the exam and earned /passed raises/ and earned Slower at “for the exam” after No-Contrast context - Because Contrast context provides contrast set for “only” Slower at disambiguation when - Context supplies contrast for “only”, so don’t need postnom mod, but turns out to be RR - Context doesn’t supply contrast for “only”, so do need postnom mod, but turns out to be MV Stay slower only when context doesn’t supply Contrast, “only” needs contrast, but sentence has MV so no contrast set ever supplied