Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by “correcting” syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.We acknowledge Spanish Government grants PSI 2008-01191/PSIC and Consolider Ingenio-2010 CE-CSD2007-00121, and pre-doctoral scholarship FPU-AP2005-4496 (II); Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant RES-062-23-0376; a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (HPB); and National Institutes of Health R01 grants HD050287, HD051030, and DC011492