On children's interpretations of negation

French children between 4 and 10 years old were asked to draw representations of French negative sentences. The results indicated that in most cases only the verb is negated when the noun phrase to the right of the negation is introduced by a definite article, but when the noun phrase is introduced by an indefinite article, it is most often the noun phrase itself that is negated. This effect is clear even in 4-year-olds, and it serves to demonstrate that the interpretation of negative sentences depends on phenomena of surface structure as well as of deep structure.     

Changes in activation levels with negation

Three experiments investigated the effects of negation during on-line language processing. It was hypothesized that negation of a noun (e.g., no bread) would affect the activation level of the mental representation of that noun. Experiment 1 manipulated the location of the negation in sentences that were followed by a probe recognition task. Subjects were slower to indicate that a probe had been in the sentence when the probe corresponded to a negated noun. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a probe naming task. Experiment 3 replicated the result that reading the phrase no bread inhibits responses to bread in the probe task but found no evidence of inhibition of the response to an associate probe, such as butter. The results of these three studies suggest that negation affects the discourse focus of a noun phrase, and hence the activation level of its representation.     

Lexical availability and grammatical encoding scope during spoken sentence production

Three sentence production experiments investigate the relationship between lexical and structural processing scope. Speakers generated sentences with varying phrase structures in response to visual displays (e.g., The dog and the hat move above the fork and the tree/The dog moves above the hat and the fork and the tree). On half of the trials, one of the pictures in the arrays was previewed. Filler sentences varied preview position and sentence structure from trial to trial. When speakers could not anticipate the position of the previewed picture in the upcoming sentence (Experiment 1), preview benefit for pictures corresponding to the second noun to be produced was limited to pictures that fell within the sentence-initial phrase. When the linear position of the previewed picture was predictable, preview benefits were observed for the second noun to be produced, irrespective of phrase position (Experiment 2). However, no preview benefits were observed for the third noun to be produced (Experiment 3). In contrast, significant effects of initial phrase structure were observed in all experiments, with latencies increasing with initial phrase length. The results are consistent with speakers operating a phrasal scope for structural planning within which the scope of lexical access can vary.     

Interface Problems: Structural Constraints on Interpretation?

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits or restricts the interpretation of an already available set, rather than giving it a nonpresuppositional or existential interpretation, in which it introduces completely new entities into the discourse. Experiment 1 showed that readers prefer a presuppositional interpretation of three ships over the existential interpretation in Five ships appeared on the horizon. Three ships sank. Experiment 2 showed longer reading times in sentences that are disambiguated toward the existential interpretation than in sentences that permit the presuppositional interpretation. Experiment 3 suggested that the presuppositional preference is greater when the phrase three ships occurs outside the verb phrase than when it occurs inside the verb phrase. Experiment 4 showed that Korean subjects marked with a topic marker received more presuppositional interpretations than subjects marked with a nominative marker. Experiment 5 showed that German subjects in VP-external (but nontopic) position received more presuppositional interpretations than VP-internal subjects. The results suggest the syntactic position of a phrase is one determinant of its interpretation, as expected according to the mapping hypothesis of Diesing (1992).This research was supported in part by grants HD-18708 and HD-17246 to the University of Massachusetts. Rayner was also supported by a Research Scientist Award (MH01255).     

Planning in sentence production: Evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit.     

Memory for sentences and noun phrases of extreme depth

Memory for orally presented noun phrases and sentences was investigated in two experiments. Syntactic depth (D) of the phrases and sentences was varied with D approaching the values of 7 ± 2. Consistent with recent investigations, these studies found D not to be generally related to recall of sentences, phrases, or individual words within sentences. However, recall of individual words from an adverbial noun phrase apparently was related to D. The apparent relationship is accounted for not by depth of individual words, but in terms primarily of superior noun retention and its interaction with serial position effects. In addition, conditional recall probabilities for another type of phrase, a noun phrase with prenominal adjectives, indicate stronger relationships between adjectives and the noun than between successive adjectives. It is concluded that the Yngve grammar is deficient as a psycholinguistic model.     

Children's comprehension of relative clauses

A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and extend the range of constructions examined. 114 children between the ages of 3 and 7 served as subjects in a test of comprehension using an act-out procedure of 9 different relative clause sentences that exhaust the possible combination of 3 roles of the complex noun phrase in the sentence and 3 roles that the head noun plays within the relative clause (in each case, subject, driect object, and indirect object). All constructions were understood better with increasing age of the children sex and sentence set were nonsignificant variables. The results reveal a difficulty in ordering of the 9 types of construction that is in keeping with a prediction based on surface structure processing strategies.This research was supported by grant No. BNS73-09150 from the National Science Foundation to Professor Roger Brown.     

Letter-detection patterns in German: A window to the early extraction of sentential structure during reading

Letters are more difficult to detect in function words than in content words, presumably because function words serve to cue sentential structure but recede to the background as meaning unfolds. This function disadvantage was found for the definite article in German for all three genders and all four cases, but it was more pronounced when the article appeared in a nominative noun phrase than in an object noun phrase. It was also more pronounced for the typical subject-predicate-object sentential format than for the object-predicate-subject sentential format and also when the definite article unequivocally specified the case of a phrase than when it was ambiguous. The results suggest that the structural frames established on line in reading are finely tuned to both phrase-level and sentence-level organization.     

Broken agreement

The subjects and verbs of English sentences agree in number. This superficially simple syntactic operation is regularly implemented by speakers, but occasionally derails in sentences such as The cost of the improvements have not yet been estimated. We examined whether the incidence of such errors was related to the presence of subject-like semantic features in the immediate preverbal nouns, in light of current questions about the semantic versus syntactic nature of sentence subjects and the interactivity of language processing. In three experiments, speakers completed sentence fragments designed to elicit erroneous agreement. We varied the number and animacy of the head noun and the immediate preverbal (local) noun, as well as the amount of material separating the head noun from the verb. The plurality of the local noun phrase had a large and reliable effect on the incidence of agreement errors, but neither its animacy nor its length affected their occurrence. The latter findings suggest, respectively, that the semantic features of sentence subjects are of minimal relevance to the syntactic and morphological processes that implement agreement, and that agreement features are specified at a point in processing where the eventual length of sentential constituents has little effect on syntactic planning. Both results follow naturally from explanations of language production that emphasize the segregation of sentence formulation processes into relatively autonomous components.     

Subject-verb agreement errors in written productions: A study of French children and adults

This experiment was designed to simulate the conditions for subject-verb agreement errors, which are rarely but regularly observed in highly educated adults. Twenty-four adults and 24 children (12 years old) were orally presented with sentences to write. The sentences were in the French past indicative (the imperfect tense) and were of two types, asfollows: Noun 1 [subject of the verb]+Verb 1+Noun 2 [object of the verb] and(Adverbial phrase)+Pronoun 1+Pronoun 2+Verb 2+ (adverbial phrase). The adverbial phrase appeared either at the beginning or the end of the sentence. The conditions were the following: Noun 1 (and Pronoun 1) and Noun 2 (and Pronoun 2) were either matched or mismatched in number, and the sentences were either followed or not by a series of five words to be memorized. Most adults made errors when the two pronouns differed in number. But, in contrast to the results of studies using the present indicative, the extra cognitive load (the word series) did not lead to more errors. The children also made errors when the two pronouns differed, and did so whatever the cognitive load. The position of the adverbial phrase did not influence the error ratio. With the imperfect tense, it seems that making the verb number agree with its subject cannot be considered as a cognitively automatic and effortless activity, even for adults.     

What do children know about the universal quantifiers all and each?

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. The first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifier to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments examined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and exhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifiers. The collective representation corresponds to the “group” meaning (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers are in the same vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustive representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in them). Four- to 10-year-old children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required them to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10-year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Children showed a preference for associating collective pictures with sentences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences containing each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years, children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes than others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradually as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semantic representations.     

Working memory and planning during sentence production

Speakers retrieve conceptual, syntactic and lexical information in advance of articulation during sentence production. What type of working memory (WM) store is used to hold the planned information before speaking? To address this question, we measured onset latencies when subjects produced sentences that began with either a complex or a simple initial noun phrase, while holding semantic, phonological or spatial information in WM. Although we found that subjects had longer onset latencies for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, showing a phrasal scope of planning, the magnitude of this complexity effect was not affected by any type of WM load. However, subjects made more syntactic errors (but not lexical errors) for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, suggesting that advance planning for these phrases occurs at a syntactic rather than lexical–semantic level, which may account for the lack of effect with various types of WM load in the current study.     

Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian

In Russian negative sentences the verb’s direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific “genitive-of-negation” phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers’ active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.     

Preschool children's use of cues to generic meaning

Sentences that refer to categories - generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly") - are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues. The first three experiments tested whether 3- and 4-year-olds use (a) the immediate linguistic context, (b) their previous knowledge, and (c) the social context to determine whether an utterance with ambiguous scope (e.g., "They are afraid of mice", spoken while pointing to 2 birds) is generic. Four-year-olds were able to take advantage of all the cues provided, but 3-year-olds were sensitive only to the first two. In Experiment 4, we tested the relative strength of linguistic-context cues and previous-knowledge cues by putting them in conflict; in this task, 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, preferred to base their interpretations on the explicit noun phrase cues from the linguistic context. These studies indicate that, from early on, children can use contextual and semantic information to construe sentences as generic, thus taking advantage of the category knowledge conveyed in these sentences.     

Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English

Ambiguity as to what the relative clause modifies in phrases such as Someone shot the maid of the actress who was divorced/Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba divorciada tends to be resolved differently in different languages (and in different forms of complex noun phrases). In English, there is a weak but seldom significant tendency for the relative clause to be taken as modifying the second noun phrase, the actress, but in Spanish, several researchers have found a significant preference for the relative clause's modifying the first noun phrase, la criada. The present experiments compare Spanish and English readers' eye movements while reading exactly comparable sentences in their native languages and find a significant reading time advantage in Spanish when it is forced to modify the first noun phrase, but in English when the relative clause is forced to modify the second noun phrase. Theoretical implications of the findings for previous explanations of the phenomenon are discussed.     

Pictures in sentences: understanding without words

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Previous research has shown that isolated pictures and words are processed equally rapidly in conceptual tasks, but that pictures are markedly slower than words in tasks requiring lexical access. The lexical hypothesis would therefore lead one to expect that rebus sentences will be relatively difficult, whereas the conceptual hypothesis would predict that rebus sentences would be rather easy. Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at a rate of 10 or 12 words per second. With one set of materials (Experiments 1 and 2), readers took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-word sentences, although the accuracy of judgment and of recall were similar for the two formats. With two new sets of materials (Experiments 3 and 5), rebus and all-word sentences were virtually equivalent except in one circumstance: when a picture replaced the noun in a familiar phrase such as seedless grapes. In contrast, when the task required overt naming of the rebus picture in a sentence context, latency to name the picture was markedly longer than to name the corresponding word, and the appropriateness of the sentence context affected picture naming but not word naming (Experiment 4). The results fail to support theories that place word meanings in a specialized lexical entry. Instead, the results suggest that the lexical representation of a noun or familiar noun phrase provides a pointer to a nonlinguistic conceptual system, and it is in that system that the meaning of a sentence is constructed.     

Tests of a holistic chunking model of sentence memory through analyses of noun intrusions

A holistic chunking model of sentence acquisition and retrieval is described and tested by a prompted sentence recall procedure. In this procedure, subjects first study a list of unrelated sentences and later receive single-word prompts to cue sentence recall. The model assumes that (1) words in sentences are grouped into propositions during acquisition, (2) the propositions are encoded holistically and later retrieved as units, and (3) the retrieval of one proposition does not automatically lead to recovery of other propositions in a sentence. The model was tested by patterns of intrusion errors. Noun intrusions for elements within a recovered proposition were always related conceptually to the presented nouns, even when a noun violated the co-occurrence restrictions of the verb (e.g., the tray loved the house). In contrast, noun intrusions for elements outside of the scope of a recovered proposition were often unrelated to presented nouns. It was argued that patterns of intrusion errors provide more appropriate tests for sentence structure than do quantitative patterns of correct recall, at least from the framework of the holistic chunking model.     

Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension

Reading time for the second clause of a conjoined sentence was found to be faster when the clause was structurally similar to the first clause than when the clausal structures differed. This “parallel structure” effect was found for each of several types of structures, including active versus passive constructions, direct object versus sentential complement (minimal vs. nonminimal attachment), nonshifted versus shifted heavy noun phrase, agent versus theme, and animate versus inanimate noun phrase. The pervasiveness of the effect ruled out some hypotheses about its basis, including the hypothesis that it would occur only when a subject’s just having processed a structure would affect how temporary ambiguities are resolved. Detailed analysis of the data suggested the existence of several distinct sources of the effect and provided indirect evidence that people typically compute both a surface structure and an S-structure representation of a sentence.     

汉语口语句子产生的语法编码计划单元

语法编码的计划单元作为口语句子产生领域的一个重要命题,近年来备受心理语言学者的关注。本研究利用词图干扰范式下的语义效应,通过两个行为实验探讨了汉语口语句子产生中的语法编码计划单元。实验中要求被试用介词短语做主语的句子或者并列名词短语做主语的句子来命名两个竖直排列的图片,并视觉呈现干扰词。结果表明,对于两个句式而言,在第二个名词上都没有潜伏期的语义干扰效应,只有错误率上的语义干扰效应,而且这个结果并没有随着SOA(目标图片和干扰词开始呈现的时间间隔)的改变(0、150或300ms)而改变。当干扰词与图片同时呈现时(SOA=0)在并列名词短语做主语的句子中,第二个名词上出现了潜伏期的语义促进效应。这些结果说明,语法编码的说法较为宽泛,应具体描述为:词汇选择是严格递进的,而概念激活的计划单元可能是功能短语。