A multi-methodological investigation of the processing and interpretation of coordinate sentences involving verb phrase anaphors

This study investigates the effects of variation in anaphoric form by comparing the processing and interpretation of a null VP-anaphoric phrase (i.e. did too) and an overt VP-anaphoric phrase (e.g. did it too) in contexts where both forms are grammatical. Unification theories predict that in contexts involving a highly accessible antecedent, participants prefer the least informative grammatical anaphoric form and that over-informative forms will be associated with processing difficulty. In Experiment 1, participants rated the null VP-anaphoric phrase as more natural than the overt VP-anaphoric phrase in contexts involving a highly accessible antecedent. In Experiment 2, participants’ eye-movements were monitored while reading the same sentences. Longer first-pass and total reading times were observed for the anaphor region when it contained an overt VP-anaphoric phrase. This effect remained when length differences were factored out. Overall, the results from both experiments support unification theories. Moreover, the eye-movement results suggest that the processing difficulty related to over-informative anaphors is best conceptualized as a violation of the expectation for a less informative anaphor.