Modifiers in metaphors: Effects of constituent phrase similarity on the interpretation of figurative sentences

Previous research has shown that the ease of metaphor interpretation and judgments of metaphor goodness are correlated with the degree of similarity between the two nouns linked in a metaphor. This study was designed to investigate the effects of adding adjective modifiers to the nouns constituting metaphorical sentences. Four types of associative relationships, between adjectives and nouns were defined. It was found that different patterns of adjective modification influenced constituent phrase similarity (e.g., the ADJECTIVE-NOUN_A is an ADJECTIVE-NOUN_B), and such differences were consistent with changes in metaphor goodness and interpretability. However, the intercorrelations among these variables were a function of the level of similarity between unmodified constituent nouns. With initially similar constituent nouns, the three variables were about equally intercorrelated. With initially dissimilar constituent nouns, constituent phrase similarity and metaphor goodness were highly correlated, but interpretability was not predictable from a linear model. Results are discussed in terms of a cognitive-feature model of association and metaphor processing.     

The comprehension and verification of ambiguous sentences

When Ss are presented with an ambiguous sentence they tend to interpret it in only one way. If later events warrant, Ss can recover the other meaning, a process which takes time. These conclusions follow from the results of a study in which 40 undergraduate Ss verified whether or not pictures shown at the end of a sentence represented the meaning of the sentence. When ambiguous sentences were presented, the verification time (VT) was no slower than for unambiguous sentences if the picture represented the “expected” meaning (as determined on a pre-test) of the ambiguity. The VT to the picture representing the “unexpected” meaning of the ambiguity was longer than VT to corresponding control sentences.     

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.     

Children's comprehension of complex sentences

Four tasks were given to children from 4–12 to test their comprehension of complex sentences containing main verbs taking underlying sentences as their complements (Sally knew that she was early). In an imperatives task, very young children interpreted only the complement verb and ignored the complex verb. In a short-term memory task, sentences with two negations usually lost the second not in recall. In direct questioning and anomaly-detection tasks, children tended to make pragmatic inferences and excessively depend on knowledge about the world, as opposed to linguistic information. Overall results showed that even sixth graders had not yet attained adult-level comprehension of complex sentences.     

Electrophysiological and behavioral measures of the influence of literal and figurative contextual constraints on proverb comprehension

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.     

Processing resource capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences

Three experiments explored the relationship between verbal working memory capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects with high, medium, and low working memory spans made acceptability judgments about garden path and control sentences under whole sentence and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) conditions. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the comprehension of garden path sentences in either condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, subjects with high and low working memory spans were tested on the same materials at three RSVP rates. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the magnitude of the effect of garden path sentences at any presentation rate. The results suggest that working memory capacity, as measured by the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading span task, is not a major determinant of individual differences in the processing of garden path sentences.     

I see what you're saying: the integration of complex speech and scenes during language comprehension

The effect of language-driven eye movements in a visual scene with concurrent speech was examined using complex linguistic stimuli and complex scenes. The processing demands were manipulated using speech rate and the temporal distance between mentioned objects. This experiment differs from previous research by using complex photographic scenes, three-sentence utterances and mentioning four target objects. The main finding was that objects that are more slowly mentioned, more evenly placed and isolated in the speech stream are more likely to be fixated after having been mentioned and are fixated faster. Surprisingly, even objects mentioned in the most demanding conditions still show an effect of language-driven eye-movements. This supports research using concurrent speech and visual scenes, and shows that the behavior of matching visual and linguistic information is likely to generalize to language situations of high information load.     

Aphasic's comprehension of sentences expressing temporal order of events

Fifty-seven aphasic patients' comprehension of five sentence forms which express the temporal order of events has been investigated. Three major patterns of errors of temporal relations have emerged. The dominant pattern is exhibited by patients making errors on Before's but not on After's. The second and third patterns comprise a fewer number of patients making errors on After's but not on Before's and those making errors on both Before's and After's, respectively. It has been shown that different syndromes of aphasia are equally distributed among these three patterns. In the follow-up study of several patients, fluctuating courses of recovery in which comprehension of before and after alternately increases and decreases have been observed. These results are discussed in connection with a possible account of the acquisition of before and after in Japanese.     

Perspective-taking and comprehension of passive sentences by Japanese-speaking children

This study demonstrates that children's difficulties in the interpretation of passives are attributed to their perspective-taking ability. Thirty-six Japanese preschool children participated in act-out sentence comprehension tasks. They were asked to manipulate two toy animals to demonstrate the meaning of two types of stimulus sentences: Type I had the child's toy, whose reference involved the child's actual name (e.g., Jun-kun no neko Jun's cat) encoded as grammatical subject, while Type II had the child's toy encoded as non-subject. Since passive structures take the perspective of the patient-denoting subject NP, it is assumed that only Type I passives have the perspective that matches that of the child.The results show that children's performance on passives was significantly better in Type I than in Type II sentences. But this difference was not observed for active sentences. For those who showed (nearly) perfect performance on active sentences, only Type I passives were equally well understood. These results strongly suggest that perspective-taking difficulties mask children's true competence on passives and that even 6-year-olds may not yet have attained the full perspective-taking ability required for comprehension of passive sentences.     

Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children

The language problems of reading-disabled elementary school children are not confined to written language alone. These children often exhibit problems of ordered recall of verbal materials that are equally severe whether the materials are presented in printed or in spoken form. Sentences that pose problems of pronoun reference might be expected to place a special burden on short-term memory because close grammatical relationships obtain between words that are distant from one another. With this logic in mind, third-grade children with specific reading disability and classmates matched for age and IQ were tested on five sentence types, each of which poses a problem in assigning pronoun reference. On one occasion the children were tested for comprehension of the sentences by a forced-choice picture verification task. On a later occasion they received the same sentences as a repetition test. Good and poor readers differed significantly in immediate recall of the reflexive sentences, but not in comprehension of them as assessed by picture choice. It was suggested that the pictures provided cues which lightened the memory load, a possibility that could explain why the poor readers were not demonstrably inferior in comprehension of the sentences even though they made significantly more errors than the good readers in recalling them.     

Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences

Eye movements were recorded as subjects read sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities. In accord with the garden-path theory of sentence comprehension, shorter reading times were found for sentences conforming to certain independently motivated parsing strategies (late closure and minimal attachment) than for comparable sentences which violate these strategies. Further, longer fixation durations were associated with the very first fixation in the region of the sentence which disambiguated the sentence, suggesting that the human sentence-parsing mechanism operates in a rather systematic fashion, immediately computing the structural consequences of fixated material for the analysis of preceding material. The pattern of regressive eye movements did not conform to the view that the parsing mechanism automatically returns to the beginning of the sentence to revise an incorrect analysis of linguistic material nor did it support the view that the parsing mechanism systematically backtracks through the sentence until the source of the erroneous analysis is located. Rather, the pattern of regressions indicated that the parsing mechanism typically engages in selective reanalysis, exploiting whatever information it has available about the type of error it has committed to guide its reanalysis attempts. Finally, it is emphasized that an understanding of the parser's revision procedures is essential to an explanation of why certain linguistic structures cannot be successfully parsed by humans.     

The comprehension of anomalous sentences: evidence from structural priming

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones constructed for well-formed sentences; and a semantic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are erroneous, or altogether missing, and interpretation is achieved on the basis of semantic representations instead. To distinguish between these accounts, we used structural priming. First, we ruled out the possibility that anomaly per se influences the magnitude of the priming effect: Prime sentences with morphologically incorrect verbs produced similarly enhanced priming (lexical boost) to sentences with the same correct verbs (Exp. 1). Second, we found that prime sentences with a novel verb (Exp. 2) or a semantically and syntactically incongruent verb (Exp. 3) produced a priming effect, which was the same as that produced by well-formed sentences. In accord with the syntactic account, we conclude that the syntactic representations of anomalous sentences are similar to those constructed for well-formed sentences. Our results furthermore suggest that lexically-independent syntactic information is robust enough to produce well-formed syntactic representations during processing without requiring aid from lexically-based syntactic information.     

Semantic and episodic constraints on the use of surface-order cues in the comprehension of locative sentences

Comprehension of ambiguous three-term locative sentences such as The book is on the desk in the crate was examined in a verification experiment. Subjects consistently chose a representation in which the spatial ordering of the objects described was congruent with the surface order of terms in the sentence. This rule was overridden, however, by the presence of semantic constraints among the terms (e.g., The shirt is in the house on the chair). When the order of locative clauses within each sentence was reversed in the second half of the experiment, subjects tended to change their representation to conform with the new surface order if the initial coding had been based on surface order. This change occurred more frequently when the objects involved more abstract, geometric shapes. The importance of syntactic, semantic, and episodic information in the comprehension of sentences is discussed.This research was conducted by the second author under the directorship of the first author.     

The role of prior context in the comprehension of abstract and concrete sentences

Summary In two experiments the hypothesis was tested that abstract sentences become as easy to understand as concrete sentences when given appropriate prior context. Paragraph contexts and sentences followed by a comprehension question were presented in a speeded reading task. The results showed that the abstract sentences remained significantly more difficult to process than the concrete sentences in both experiments. The hypothesis that the concreteness effect is a function of differential context availability was therefore not supported. It was proposed that lexical differences and/or differences in ease of propositional integration may underlie the effect.     

Depth of comprehension,effective elaboration,and memory for sentences

It was hypothesized that depth of comprehension is a function of the complexity of the meaning components of a sentence that are activated during initial encoding. In four experiments, subjects were presented sentences containing either transitive causative verbs (e.g., “John opened the door”) or their intransitive noncausative counterparts (e.g., “The door opened”) and were required to produce a continuation to each sentence. Based on the above hypothesis, sentences for which the continuations induced causative interpretations should be remembered better than sentences for which noncausitive interpretations were induced. The results confirmed this hypothesis, and they are considered in relation to depth of comprehension, effective elaboration, and the role of inferences in memory for sentences.     

Cognitive processes,school achievement,and comprehension of ambiguous sentences

Previous research has identified three distinct forms of linguistic ambiguity: lexical, surface structural, and deep structural. Cummins and Das (1978) studied these forms of ambiguity in the context of Das, Kirby and Jarman's (1979) model of simultaneous and successive processing, and demonstrated that comprehension of lexical ambiguity depended upon simultaneous processing, while that of surface and deep structural ambiguity depended upon successive processing. The present study investigated the relationship between these cognitive and linguistic processes in a group of older children. The subjects' level of English achievement was also considered. The results showed that comprehension of all three forms of ambiguity was strongly related to level of English achievement, though deep structure ambiguities best descriminated the English achievement groups. Results also showed that perception of all types of ambiguity was related to both simultaneous and successive processing. Subjects with high successive processing scores had an additional advantage in perceiving deep structure ambiguities. These results suggest the need for an elaboration of the Cummins and Das cognitive process model of liguistic processes, demonstrating that a variety of task variables can alter the cognitive processes required in performance of linguistic tasks.This study was supported by an Australian Research Grants Committee grant to J. B. Biggs and the author.     

The comprehension of action-related sentences may cause interference rather than facilitation on matching actions

This study used a dual-task paradigm to analyze the time course of motor resonance during the comprehension of action language. In the study, participants read sentences describing a transfer either away from (“I threw the tennis ball to my rival”) or toward themselves (“My rival threw me the tennis ball”). When the transfer verb appeared on the screen, and after a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), a visual motion cue (Experiment 1) or a static cue (Experiment 2) prompted participants to move their hand either away from or toward themselves to press a button. The results showed meaning–action interference at short SOAs and facilitation at the longest SOA for the matching conditions. These results support the hypothesis that motor processes associated with the comprehension of action-related language interfere with an overlapping motor task, whereas they facilitate a delayed motor task. These effects are discussed in terms of resonance processes in the motor cortex.     

If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: the on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more expected, which influenced listeners' on-line hypotheses from the onset of the color word. The unfamiliarity bias was sharply reduced by instructions that the speaker had object agnosia, and thus difficulty naming familiar objects (Experiment 2), but was not affected by intermittent sources of speaker distraction (beeps and construction noises; Experiments 3). The authors conclude that listeners can make situation-specific inferences about likely sources of disfluency, but there are some limitations to these attributions.     

Relational processing and working memory capacity in comprehension of relative clause sentences

Previous research has indicated that the cognitive load imposed by tasks in various content domains increases with the complexity of the relational information processed. Sentence comprehension entails processing noun-verb relations to determine who did what to whom. The difficulty of object-extracted relative clause sentences might stem from the complex noun-verb relations they entail. Across three studies, participants read 16 types of object- and subject-extracted relative clause sentences at their own pace and then responded to a comprehension question for each sentence. Relational processing was assessed using a premise integration task or a Latin square task. These tasks predicted comprehension of object-relatives before and after controlling for subject-relatives. Working memory (WM) capacity was assessed using reading span or forward and backward digit span tests. WM tasks predicted comprehension of object-relatives before but not after controlling for subject-relatives. Comprehension of object-relatives relied more heavily on a domain-general capacity to process complex relations than on WM capacity.