Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France.
PLoS One. 2018 Jun 13;13(6):e0198620. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198620. eCollection 2018.
In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent's memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape's (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure.
在一项关于德语流水句的自定步调阅读研究中，Paape（Paape，2016）发现，当先行词是一个暂时歧义的花园小径结构时，在省略位置的阅读时间更短。作为对这一发现的事后解释，Paape 假设先行词的记忆表征在句法重新分析过程中被重新激活，从而更容易被检索到。在两项眼动追踪实验中，我们进一步对重新激活假说进行了实证检验。在法语进行的实验 1 中，没有证据支持重新激活假说。相反，对所测试的三种花园小径句子类型中的一种类型的结果表明，有时受试者无法解决先行词从句中的暂时歧义，随后也无法解决省略问题。实验 2 的结果，即 Paape（Paape，2016）在德语中进行的原始研究的概念复制，与重新激活假说一致，但也不排除观察到的歧义先行词的加速可能是由于偶尔检索到错误的结构。
