The predominance of nonstructural factors in the processing of gapping sentences

Two studies investigated the effects of pragmatic context and prosody on the processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. This sentence is ambiguous between the clearly preferred 'nongapping ' reading, where John greeted Ben, and the unpreferred 'gapping ' reading, where Ben greeted Paul. Participants listen to dialogues and give a speeded response as to which reading of an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects on the choice for gapping, and that, in the right combination, they can make gapping the preferred reading. Thus, even if structural factors were to play a role in processing gapping, they are outweighed by context and prosody