Incremental structure building in the processing of ellipsis

Abstract

This article presents the results of two experiments conducted to examine how ellipsis sites are processed during the processing of backward sluicing, which is superficially similar to non-sluicing wh-filler-gap dependencies. Previous studies on long-distance wh-filler-gap dependencies established that the processing of these dependencies is sensitive to the syntactic structure of materials within the dependency: CP vs. NP. Results from two maze experiments show that backward sluicing processing is sensitive to the same structural factors, confirming that the same processing mechanism underlies both constructions. We suggest that an active search mechanism is operating at the core for these structures and with the interaction of the ellipsis-specific mechanism, e.g., a word-by-word copying mechanism, the parser builds antecedent structure within the ellipsis site incrementally during the processing of backward sluicing.