In sluiced sentences like “Nolan colored, but he wouldn't tell me what”, the elided clause (“what [Nolan colored _]”) contains a gap not present in the antecedent clause (“Nolan colored”). Previous work has shown that interpreting such nonparallel sluiced sentences creates measurable processing difficulty, and these processing costs have been interpreted as evidence for an ellipsis-specific “sprouting” operation. The current study compared sluiced sentences and their nonelided counterparts in a self-paced reading task. Results show that nonparallelism was equally costly for both sluiced and nonelided sentences. This finding suggests that these processing costs are as likely to be due to a violation of parallelism expectations for coordinated structures as to be due to ellipsis-specific operations. For nonelided sentences, moreover, the transitivity biases of individual verbs affected the magnitude of these parallelism costs: verb-specific transitivity biases were a reliable predictor of reading times for the nonelided sentences, though not for the sluiced sentences. Implications for the representation and processing of elided structure and the role of verb-specific transitivity biases are discussed.
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