Challenging prior evidence for a shared syntactic processor for language and music

A theoretical landmark in the growing literature comparing language and music is the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH; e.g., Patel, 2008), which posits that the successful processing of linguistic and musical materials relies, at least partially, on the mastery of a common syntactic processor. Supporting the SSIRH, Slevc, Rosenberg, and Patel (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2):374–381, 2009) recently reported data showing enhanced syntactic garden path effects when the sentences were paired with syntactically unexpected chords, whereas the musical manipulation had no reliable effect on the processing of semantic violations. The present experiment replicated Slevc et al.’s (2009) procedure, except that syntactic garden paths were replaced with semantic garden paths. We observed the very same interactive pattern of results. These findings suggest that the element underpinning interactions is the garden path configuration, rather than the implication of an alleged syntactic module. We suggest that a different amount of attentional resources is recruited to process each type of linguistic manipulations, hence modulating the resources left available for the processing of music and, consequently, the effects of musical violations.     

句法歧义消解影响因素、认知机制及其神经基础

句法歧义消解主要是指人们在面临多种句法分析可能性的情况下,句法分析器抑制不正确的句法分析而选择正确句法分析的认知过程。研究表明,该过程受到工作记忆、认知控制能力、语言分布频率、语境、韵律等因素的影响。为有效说明人们是如何完成句法歧义消解的,研究者们建构了诸如花园路径模型、约束满意理论、弱交互作用句法分析理论等相关模型。另外,基于脑成像技术研究表明,左侧额下回、左侧颞叶后部、中部和前部在句法消歧任务中都有显著激活。未来研究当围绕着句法消歧中的语义效应、句法和词汇歧义消解机制的异同、句法消歧中抑制能力的效应等方面展开。     

Syntactic and semantic contributions to sentence comprehension in agrammatism

Five aphasic subjects, who demonstrated agrammatic speech, and eight control subjects were presented with a sentence-picture matching task in which the factors of syntactic complexity, semantic reversibility, and sentence plausibility were independently varied. A subset of the sentences was patterned after that presented by A. Caramazza and E. Zurif (1976, Brain and Language, 5, 572-583) who concluded that Broca's aphasics rely on semantic constraints instead of syntactic information for sentence comprehension. Our aphasic subjects showed the same pattern of performance on this subset of sentences. However, the results from the full set of sentence materials we tested show that the aphasic subjects could perform some sentence level syntactic analyses, even when syntactic information conflicted with semantic constraints. The aphasic subjects correctly interpreted most active and passive sentences. They failed, however, to assign thematic roles and adjectives in center-embedded relative sentences, and instead relied on nonsyntactic information. These results show that both semantic and syntactic information contributed to sentence comprehension in the aphasic subjects we tested, in contrast to previous claims that syntactic and semantic processes are completely dissociated in this population.     

Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia

Three groups of aphasic patients, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's, and a nonaphasic patients control group were tested for comprehension of object-relative center-embedded sentences. The sentences were of three types: sentences in which semantic constraints between words allowed the subjects to assign a correct semantic reading of the sentence without decoding the syntax, sentences in which semantic constraints were relaxed and for which a correct reading was only possible with knowledge of syntactic relationships among words, and sentences which described highly improbable events. The subjects' task was to choose which of two pictures captured the meaning expressed in the sentence. Broca's and Conduction aphasics performed near perfectly on sentences where they could use semantic information. Their performance dropped to chance when they had to use syntactic information. These results support a neuropsychological dissociation of heuristic and algorithmic processes based primarily, though not exclusively, on semantic and syntactic information, respectively.     

汉语句子加工中句法信息与语义信息的交互作用：来自ERP的证据

采用ERP技术考察句子加工过程中句法信息和语义信息交互作用的时间进程。以汉语“把字句”为实验材料,分别比较句法违例句与双重违例句的LAN和P600效应、语义违例句与双重违例句的N400效应。与句法违例句相比,双重违例句的LAN效应的波幅更负,潜伏期更长,皮层分布更广泛;双重违例句的P600效应出现减弱趋势;双重违例句的N400效应的潜伏期显著长于语义违例句。结果表明,在句子加工的各个阶段,句法信息和语义信息呈持续交互作用,支持句子的平行加工模型。     

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.     

Effects of Weight and Syntactic Priming on the Production of Cantonese Verb-Doubling

Verb-doubling, where a copy of the main verb occurs both before and after the direct object, is a structure commonly used in Chinese in sentences containing a frequency or duration phrase. In Cantonese, verb-doubling is highly optional and therefore problematic for existing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic accounts of its distribution in Mandarin. The current study investigates the role of grammatical weight and syntactic priming in the choice of verb-doubling in Cantonese. Following (Hawkins in Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) theory of efficiency and complexity in grammars, we hypothesized that speakers would choose verb-doubling over the canonical structure more often when the object NP was heavy, in order to minimize processing domains. In addition, we expected an effect of syntactic priming whereby the choice of structure is influenced by a previously encountered structure. The results of two elicited production experiments revealed no weight-based preference for verb-doubling, and only minor effects of grammatical weight, but clear effects of syntactic priming: (1) for both canonical primes and verb-doubling primes, speakers tended to repeat previously heard structures; (2) the priming effect was just as strong in the heavy NP condition, where speakers made more errors recalling the semantic content of the sentence, suggesting that semantic information is represented separately from syntactic information; (3) the priming effect was stronger for informationally accurate responses, suggesting that recently activated structures are easier to produce than other structures under conditions of increased cognitive load. We conclude that the choice between verb-doubling and canonical structure in Cantonese is easily influenced by the structure of recently encountered sentences, with weight effects, if any, being more difficult to detect.     

Making psycholinguistics musical: Self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Automatic syntactic computation and use of semantic information during sentence comprehension

Summary The paper represents a contribution to the issue of the differential effects of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information in the process of sentence comprehension. The results of four experiments are reported, in which sentences containing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic violations were presented with different tasks to see how these violations affected language comprehension, how easily they were detected and whether they affected sentence comprehension even when they were not explicitly recognized. The main results can be summarized as follows. First, the most relevant cues used to comprehend a sentence are not so much syntactic, but semantic or pragmatic. Second, with difficult or anomalous linguistic input, syntactic cues become more important. Third, even when the reader is not aware of syntactic violations, these seem to affect his processing of the linguistic input. This suggests the hypothesis of an automatic computation of syntactic information, the output of which is, however, used only when evidence coming from other sources, semantic or pragmatic, is insufficient or not clear enough.     

The Understanding of Word Definitions in School-Age Children

This study investigated children’s understanding of unfamiliar noun and verb definitions in tasks that were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties of definitions. The study was also designed to examine the relation between understanding word definitions and the skills of syntactic awareness and making inferences. A total of 117 children over three upper elementary grades (3, 4, 5) participated in the study. The definitional tasks were presented in multiple choice format, with each definition followed by four context sentences. In the syntactic/semantic condition, which included nouns and verbs, the context sentences were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties. In the semantic condition, which included only nouns, the context sentences were manipulated only for semantics. All children also completed a syntactic awareness task and a making inferences task. Results indicated that children did not make significant grade improvements in the semantic task, but did so in the syntactic/semantic task, suggesting the dependence of syntactic cues on definitional understanding. Findings further suggested that inferencing and syntactic awareness are important to children’s ability in understanding a definition for an unfamiliar word and to integrating that meaning into a context sentence.     

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.     

Retrieval of sentence relations: Semantic vs. syntactic deep structure

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context are reported. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and recipient coincided with the syntactic function of deep subject and object, respectively, was better than for sentences which did not have this normal semantic-syntactic coincidence. Unaided recall was not different for the two types of sentences. Models of sentence processing may have to represent both types of information as available to the language user.     

Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing

Functional dissociations within the neural basis of auditory sentence processing are difficult to specify because phonological, syntactic and semantic information are all involved when sentences are perceived. In this review I argue that sentence processing is supported by a temporo-frontal network. Within this network, temporal regions subserve aspects of identification and frontal regions the building of syntactic and semantic relations. Temporal analyses of brain activation within this network support syntax-first models because they reveal that building of syntactic structure precedes semantic processes and that these interact only during a later stage.     

Gender Electrified: ERP Evidence on the Syntactic Nature of Gender Processing

The central issue of this study concerns the claim that the processing of gender agreement in online sentence comprehension is a syntactic rather than a conceptual/semantic process. This claim was tested for the grammatical gender agreement in Dutch between the definite article and the noun. Subjects read sentences in which the definite article and the noun had the same gender and sentences in which the gender agreement was violated. While subjects read these sentences, their electrophysiological activity was recorded via electrodes placed on the scalp. Earlier research has shown that semantic and syntactic processing events manifest themselves in different event-related brain potential (ERP) effects. Semantic integration modulates the amplitude of the so-called N400. The P600/SPS is an ERP effect that is more sensitive to syntactic processes. The violation of grammatical gender agreement was found to result in a P600/SPS. For violations in sentence-final position, an additional increase of the N400 amplitude was observed. This N400 effect is interpreted as resulting from the consequence of a syntactic violation for the sentence-final wrap-up. The overall pattern of results supports the claim that the on-line processing of gender agreement information is not a content driven but a syntactic-form driven process.     

Favor Referential Representations

Avrutin and Hickok (1993) argue that agrammatic patients have the ability to represent nonreferential or "government" chains ("who... e") but not referential or "binding" chains ("which girl... e"). By contrast, we propose the "referential representation hypothesis," which suggests that agrammatics attempt to cope with their well-known capacity limitations by favoring referential or content-based representations. This predicts that agrammatic patients′ performance should degrade noticeably as task demands increase, and referential demands should take priority over computational ones. In a semantic task, referential phrases should lead to better or more accurate performances. In syntactic tasks, the availability of a referential or content-based representation will interfere with the development of a syntactic representation, resulting in worse syntactic performance on the referential phrases than on nonreferential ones. This predicts that agrammatic patients should incorrectly accept (resumptive) pronoun sentences with a referential wh-phrase because the pronouns will find the semantic or discourse referent of the referential wh-phrase and take it as an antecedent for the pronoun. However, they should reject a (resumptive) pronoun in a sentence with the nonreferential question constituent "who" or "what." "Who" and "what" will remain in syntactic form, since they have only grammatical content and therefore will have only a "nonreferential" syntactic representation. Consequently, they cannot serve as the antecedent of the pronoun. These predictions were largely confirmed by the results of a grammaticality judgement study. Agrammatics performed well on questions with pragmatic biases but failed to distinguish reliably between grammatical and ungrammatical questions where pragmatic biases were neutralized. They assigned especially low ratings to object gap sentences with referential wh-constituents, as predicted. They assigned relatively high ratings to ungrammatical subject pronoun sentences with either type of wh-constituent. The agrammatics accepted ungrammatical reflexive sentences even though syntactic number and gender features alone could have been used to correctly judge the sentences. We attribute this, too, to the unavailability of a reliable syntactic representation of those phrases with referential or extragrammatical semantic content.     

The effect of semantic and syntactic structure on verbal memory in Alzheimer's disease

This study examined the ability of 17 patients with Alzheimer's disease and 17 normal-old subjects to recall short sentences that were normal, or had a disruption in either their semantic structure, their syntactic structure, or both their semantic and syntactic structure. Results showed that sentence recall performance was affected similarly in the demented and normal-old subjects by both the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentences. The presence of either type of language structure appeared to allow both normal and demented subjects to organize strings of words into multiword chunks for more efficient memory encoding.     

Learning to divide the labor: an account of deficits in light and heavy verb production

Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual‐semantic and syntactic‐sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sentences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single‐word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single‐word tasks, in agreement with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division‐of‐labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding of non‐transparent neuropsychological dissociations.     

Processing local and unbounded dependencies: A unified account

This paper proposes an account of incremental sentence processing and the initial stage of syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on the claim that the processor seeks to provide semantic interpretations for sentence fragments as soon as it possibly can. In this model, there is no fundamental distinction between local and unbounded dependencies. The processor employs a version of categorial grammar based on dependency grammar, in which dependency constituents are derived from dependencies between words and are permitted to overlap. The processor seeks to form dependency constituents as soon as it can, and to give interpretations to these fragments immediately. The initial stage of ambiguity resolution is determined by theprinciple of dependency formation, under which the processor automatically chooses an analysis that allows a single dependency constituent to be formed in preference to one that does not. The motivation is semantic: Such an analysis maximizes the amount of incremental interpretation that is possible. But if more than one analysis is compatible with the formation of a single constituent, the processor can appeal to a range of sources of nonsyntactic information in making its choice. I show how this account can capture a range of psycholinguistic evidence without positing any fundamental distinction between local and unbounded dependencies.     

The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements

In the present study, we examined the time course of semantic and syntactic processing when Chinese is read. Readers’ eye movements were monitored, and the relation between a single-character critical word and the sentence context was manipulated such that three kinds of sentences were developed: (1) congruent, (2) those with a semantic violation, and (3) those with both a semantic and a syntactic violation. The eye movement data showed that the first-pass reading times were significantly longer for the target region in the two violation conditions than in the congruent condition. Moreover, the semantic + syntactic violation caused more severe disruption than did the pure semantic violation, as reflected by longer first-pass reading times for the target region and by longer go-past times for the target region and posttarget region in the former than in the latter condition. These results suggest that the effects of, at least, a semantic violation can be detected immediately by Chinese readers and that the processing of syntactic and semantic information is distinct in both first-pass and second-pass reading.     

An event-related fMRI study of syntactic and semantic violations

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in syntactic and semantic processing. Healthy adult males read well-formed sentences randomly intermixed with sentences which either contained violations of syntactic structure or were semantically implausible. Reading anomalous sentences, as compared to well-formed sentences, yielded distinct patterns of activation for the two violation types. Syntactic violations elicited significantly greater activation than semantic violations primarily in superior frontal cortex. Semantically incongruent sentences elicited greater activation than syntactic violations in the left hippocampal and parahippocampal gyri, the angular gyri bilaterally, the right middle temporal gyrus, and the left inferior frontal sulcus. These results demonstrate that syntactic and semantic processing result in nonidentical patterns of activation, including greater frontal engagement during syntactic processing and larger increases in temporal and temporo-parietal regions during semantic analyses.