Schäfer Lisa, Lemke Robin, Drenhaus Heiner, Reich Ingo
Collaborative Research Center 1102, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Department of Modern German Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 May 26;12:661087. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661087. eCollection 2021.
We investigate the underexplored question of when speakers make use of the omission phenomenon verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English given that the full form is also available to them. We base the interpretation of our results on the well-established information-theoretic Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis: Speakers tend to distribute processing effort uniformly across utterances and avoid regions of low information by omitting redundant material through, e.g., VPE. We investigate the length of the omittable VP and its predictability in context as sources of redundancy which lead to larger or deeper regions of low information and an increased pressure to use ellipsis. We use both naturalness rating and self-paced reading studies in order to link naturalness patterns to potential processing difficulties. For the length effects our rating and reading results support a UID account. Surprisingly, we do not find an effect of the context on the naturalness and the processing of VPE. We suggest that our manipulation might have been too weak or not effective to evidence such an effect.
在英语中，当说话者可以使用动词短语省略（VPE）的完整形式时，他们何时会使用省略现象。我们基于已确立的信息理论均匀信息密度（UID）假设来解释我们的结果：说话者倾向于在话语中均匀分配处理精力，并通过省略冗余材料（例如通过VPE）来避免低信息区域。我们研究可省略动词短语的长度及其在语境中的可预测性，将其作为冗余的来源，这些冗余会导致更大或更深的低信息区域，并增加使用省略的压力。我们使用自然度评级和自定步速阅读研究，以便将自然度模式与潜在的处理困难联系起来。对于长度效应，我们的评级和阅读结果支持UID解释。令人惊讶的是，我们没有发现语境对VPE的自然度和处理有影响。我们认为，我们的操纵可能太弱或无效，无法证明这种影响。
