Interpreting Elliptical Verb Phrases at Different Times of Day: Effects of Plausibility and Antecedent Distance

Abstract

This paper reports an experiment that used the self-paced reading technique to explore subjects' on-line processing of short texts at two times of day (early morning and late afternoon). A previous experiment (Oakhill, 1986b) has shown that, when reading simple texts, subjects adopt a “less effortful” strategy in the morning; they delay processing until it is needed to answer a question. in the present experiment, we used a more difficult anaphor resolution task that resulted in more errors. Under these circumstances, the morning subjects increased their on-line processing effort. They needed to spend longer reading the more difficult texts in order to achieve the same level of accuracy as subjects tested in the afternoon.