Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., & Arnold, J. E. (2000). The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(2), 195-203.

Thornton, R.; MacDonald, M.; Arnold, J.

2000

Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., & Arnold, J. E. (2000). The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(2), 195-203.

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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 may 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.

This study provides additional evidence that phrase length plays a significant role in modification ambiguities. RTs at the disambiguation were significantly shorter for VP modification in the short than in the long condition. Thus, as the distance between the VP site and the modifier increases, the preference to modify the VP decreases. The second important result is that phrase length manipulations nt only directly modulate modification preferences, but they also exert an additional pragmatic effect on the sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Length manipulations will still likely change the informational content of the overall sentence, but changes in the modifiability of the individual sites can hopefully be minimized.

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