The Effect of Phonological Parallelism in Coordination: Evidence from Eye-tracking

In this paper we report an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate syntactic and phonological parallelism effects in comprehension. Eye-movements were recorded while participants read sentences that contained particle verb constructions. Each experimental item included a coordinated verb phrase (VP), whose two conjuncts either exhibited parallel syntactic forms in terms of particle placement (e.g., The lawyer won over the jury and fought off the developers), or did not (e.g., The lawyer won the jury over and fought off the developers). In addition to the manipulation of syntactic form, the number of syllables intervening between the verb and the particle ranged from zero to five across the item set. Linear regression analysis revealed a reading time advantage for VPs that were parallel in terms of the number of intervening syllables. However, processing was not speeded by parallelism of syntactic form per se. We argue that theories that seek to explain syntactic parallelism need to take account of phonological length.