Effects of Antecedent Distance and Intervening Text Structure in the Interpretation of Ellipses

Abstract

There is much evidence to suggest that there are at least two aspects of the mental encoding of a text — surface form and content. Long-term retention is of memory for content, but a representation of surface form is essential for the on-line interpretation of certain grammatical constructions, such as Verb-Phrase Ellipsis. Two experiments are reported that investigate the availability of surface representations. The first shows that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence. This result confirms previous findings on the importance of that sentence, and shows, even in a task where the retention of surface form is essential, that representation nevertheless rapidly becomes difficult to access. The second experiment shows that the results of the first cannot be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents, since distance has an effect even in passages judged to be more natural.