Townsend, D. J., & Bever, T. G. (1978). Interclause relations and clausal processing. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 17(5), 509-521.

Townsend, D.; Bever, T.

1978

Townsend, D. J., & Bever, T. G. (1978). Interclause relations and clausal processing. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 17(5), 509-521.

1

In 2 experiments with 32 undergraduates, Ss were interrupted while listening to a 2-clause sentence just before the last word of either the initial or final clause. In Exp I Ss were timed on their decision about whether a verb-object phrase was consistent in meaning with the sentence fragment they had just heard. Overall these decisions were made more quickly when a main clause was interrupted than when a subordinate clause was interrupted, but the size and direction of main-subordinate differences varied with the causal-temporal properties of subordinate clauses. In Exp II, Ss were timed on their decisions about whether a particular probe word had occurred in the sentence fragment. Target position effects differed for main and subordinate clauses, but again, these effects were related to causal-temporal relations between clauses. The 2 experiments together suggest that interclause semantic relations affect the immediate processing of clauses.

Overall, on-line accessibility to meaning was faster in main clauses than in subordinate clauses. While this result favors the structural hypothesis, the considerable variation in the size and even direction of subordinate-main differences across fragments using different conjunctions casts doubt on both the structural and presuppositional hypotheses as explanation for this data.

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