UC Santa Cruz

The human processing of natural language occasionally reflects systematicies of the system’s formal organization, often at the level of syntax. Data on the processing of appositive relative clauses (Dillon et al., 2014; Dillon et al., 2017) suggest that the processor may also be sensitive to the pragmatic organization of information within a sentence: independent speech acts embedded within a maximal speech act appear to be isolated from later parsing and decision making. In three experiments, I examine the processing of another structure which may create an embedded speech act, direct discourse speech reports. Despite existing evidence suggesting direct discourse is indeed processed independently from its superordinate context, the experiments reported here find no support for the prediction that it is isolated from downstream processes. Taking this as evidence against the strong hypothesis that subordinate speech acts serve as hard boundaries in processing, I outline possible alternative hypotheses.