Punctuation and intonation effects on clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from eye movements Masako Hirotani * , Lyn Frazier, Keith Rayner University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA Received 29 July 2005; revision received 5 December 2005 Available online 8 February 2006 Abstract Three eye movement studies examined the role of punctuation in reading. In Experiment 1, although a comma at the end of a clause facilitated overall reading times for the sentence, first pass times were longer at the end of comma- marked clauses than clauses without a comma (or the same material in clause medial position). The data supported the dwell time hypothesis which claims that readers pause at punctuation marks. To explore the possibility that dwell time/wrap-up effects are really due to pausing at the ends of intonational phrases, Experiment 2 tested non-redundant punctuation in structures where a comma corresponds to an obligatory intonational phrase boundary in speech. The intonation hypothesis was supported for vocatives and parentheticals but not for non-restrictive relative clauses. Rel- ative clauses were further investigated in Experiment 3. Overall, the data were consistent with the intonation explana- tion for wrap-up effects but only if it is assumed that non-restrictive relatives and other asides receive less attention than do other parts of a sentence. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Reading; Eye movements; Clause wrap-up; Sentence wrap-up; Intonation During reading, readers tend to pause longer on a word that ends a clause (Hill & Murray, 2000; Rayner, Kambe, & Duffy, 2000; Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Sch- mauder, & Clifton, 1989) or a sentence (Just & Carpen- ter, 1980; Mitchell & Green, 1978; Rayner et al., 1989). These wrap-up effects occur when the clause or sentence end is signaled by a comma or period, and have typically been attributed to unfinished interpretive processing and updating of the discourse representation. Consistent with this ‘classical’ view of wrap-up, Rayner et al. (2000) argued that the wrap-up process is designed to ensure that the information from the clause is fully inte- grated and that all within-clause comprehension prob- lems are settled. In sum, the classical view of wrap-up effects attributes the slow-down at the ends of clauses to unfinished interpretation of the clause and updating of the discourse representation. On this view, wrap-up is a reflex of the amount of work that needs to be done at the ends of clauses. At a practical level, one consequence of these wrap-up effects is that it has become standard practice in psycho- linguistics research to avoid placing the target region at the end of a sentence precisely to avoid these effects. Fur- ther, wrap-up also influences the location of fixations. 0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.12.001 * Corresponding author. Present address: Max Planck Insti- tute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. Fax: +1 49 341 9940 260. E-mail address: hirotani@cbs.mpg.de (M. Hirotani). Journal of Memory and Language 54 (2006) 425–443 www.elsevier.com/locate/jml Journal of Memory and Language