In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing…

Explored the processing of ambiguous sentences that may be assigned a gapping or nongapping structure. Focuses on what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the nongapping…