Verb Phrase Ellipsis: A Research Tool

We describe a ubiquitous linguistic construction, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), in which the verb phrase in the second clause is phonetically unrealized (___): The pharmacist bought a house and the electrician did __ too, according to the real estate agent. VPE is a useful and promising tool to investigate and differentiate interpretive processes in normal and disordered language processing. We present linguistic analyses of VPE and its properties. We then review the processing literature on VPE, and finally introduce the first of a series of experiments we are currently running on VPE processing in aphasia