Recency in verb phrase attachment

Four experiments investigated attachment preferences in constructions involving 3 verb phrases (VPs) followed by an attaching modifier. Readers preferred attachment to the most recent (lowest) VP site overall and preferred to attach the modifier to the middle VP over the highest VP, demonstrating a monotonic recency-based preference ordering. This pattern could not be attributed to lexical or plausibility-based preferences. The results contrast with the pattern for relative clause attachment into 3 potential noun phrase sites, where the preference ordering is nonmonotonic (e.g., E. Gibson, N. J. Pearlmutter, E. Canseco-Gonzalez, & G. Hickok, 1996), and support the multiple-constraint theory described by E. Gibson and N. J. Pearlmutter (1998), which proposes that recency/locality and a secondary factor, predicate proximity, combine with lexical, grammatical, prosodic, and contextual constraints to determine attachment preferences.     

Effects of concurrent arithmetical and syntactic complexity on self-paced reaction times and eye fixations

Two dual-task experiments (replications of Experiments 1 and 2 in Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 246–269 2007) were conducted to determine whether syntactic and arithmetical operations share working memory resources. Subjects read object- or subject-extracted relative clause sentences phrase by phrase in a self-paced task while simultaneously adding or subtracting numbers. Experiment 2 measured eye fixations as well as self-paced reaction times. In both experiments, there were main effects of syntax and of mathematical operation on self-paced reading times, but no interaction of the two. In the Experiment 2 eye-tracking results, there were main effects of syntax on first-pass reading time and total reading time and an interaction between syntax and math in total reading time on the noun phrase within the relative clause. The findings point to differences in the ways individuals process sentences under these dual-task conditions, as compared with viewing sentences during “normal” reading conditions, and do not support the view that arithmetical and syntactic integration operations share a working memory system.     

Sensitivity to Crossover Constraints During Native and Non-native Pronoun Resolution

We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native German speakers’ sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch paradigm, Experiment 1 investigated whether a fronted wh-phrase would be considered as a potential antecedent for a pronoun intervening between the wh-phrase and its canonical position. Both native and non-native readers initially attempted coreference in WCO but not in SCO configurations, as evidenced by early gender-mismatch effects in our WCO conditions. Experiment 2 was an offline antecedent judgement task whose results mirrored the SCO/WCO asymmetry observed in our reading-time data. Taken together, our results show that the SCO constraint immediately restricts pronoun interpretation in both native and non-native comprehension, and further suggest that SCO and WCO constraints derive from different sources.     

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.     

Relative Clause Effects at the Matrix Verb Depend on Type of Intervening Material

Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017) demonstrated that readers experience more processing difficulty at the matrix verb for ORCs than for SRCs when the matrix verb immediately follows the relative clause (RC), but the difficulty is eliminated if a prepositional phrase (PP) intervenes. A careful examination of Staub et al.’s materials reveals that the types of PPs used in the experiment were a mixture of locative and temporal PPs. This is important in that locative PPs can modify either a noun phrase or a verb phrase (VP), whereas temporal PPs typically modify VPs, resulting in systematic differences in PP attachment across ORCs versus SRCs. In the current eye-tracking experiment, we systematically manipulated RC type and PP type in the same sentences used by Staub et al. The manipulation of PP type resulted in a crossover pattern at the matrix verb such that there was a trend for reading times to be longer for ORCs than SRCs when the PP was locative, but reading times were longer for SRCs than ORCs when the PP was temporal. These results provide important information regarding the locus of RC-processing effects and highlight the importance of carefully considering how intervening material might unintentionally alter the structure or the meaning of a sentence.     

Distinct Neurophysiological Patterns Reflecting Aspects of Syntactic Complexity and Syntactic Repair

Aspects of syntactic complexity and syntactic repair were investigated by comparing the event-related (brain) potentials (ERPs) for sentences of different syntactic complexity to those containing a syntactic violation. Previous research had shown that both aspects of syntactic processing are reflected in a late positivity (P600). Results from the present reading experiment demonstrate, however, that although both processing aspects elicit a late positivity, they are different in distribution. The repair-related positivity preceded by a negativity displayed a centroparietal distribution, whereas the complexity-related positivity showed a frontocentral scalp distribution. These data indicate that the P600 is not a unitary phenomenon. Moreover, the distributional differences strongly suggest that different neural structures underlie the two aspects of processing, namely syntactic repair and syntactic integration difficulties, most evident when processing syntactically complex sentences.     

Subject-Object Ambiguities in German Embedded Clauses: An Across-the-Board Comparison

This paper examines the processing of embedded clauses in German which are ambiguous between a subject-before-object and an object-before-subject order. In an experiment using a speeded grammaticality judgment task, four types of locally ambiguous clauses were compared: (i) sentences involving movement of a definite noun phrase (NP), (ii) sentences involving pronoun movement, (iii) relative clauses, and (iv) embedded questions. We found that readers were consistently garden-pathed in the object-before-subject condition, regardless of sentence type. Furthermore, there were considerable differences with respect to garden-path strength. The garden-path effect was strongest for sentences involving scrambling. In addition, sentences involving pronoun movement induced more processing difficulty than embedded questions and relative clauses. We argue that our findings can be best explained within a serial processing model that acknowledges both syntactic and nonsyntactic influences on reanalysis and that can account for graded effects of garden-path strength.     

句法预测对句子理解影响的眼动实验

实验采用眼动技术实时考察了句子阅读理解过程中的句法预测效应和并列句的结构表征特点。眼动数据分析发现：(1)有无句法预测没有明显影响名词短语区域的加工, 不同眼动指标差异不显著; (2)有无句法预测显著影响被试对包含暂时局部歧义的关键区和具有解歧作用的关键后区域的阅读理解, 首次注视时间、第一遍阅读时间、回视路径时间和第一遍回视率明显减少。眼动研究表明, 暂时局部歧义句子阅读理解过程中表现出明显的句法预测效应, 有句法预测降低了局部歧义区域和解歧区域早期和晚期加工的难度; 和英语的短语并列优先法则不同, 汉语并列句子的结构表征出现分离现象, 即短语并列和句子并列。     

聋生“是……的”句的句法意识

聋生在书面语语法学习中遇到极大困难。以"是……的"句为实验材料,使用移动窗口式自步速逐词句子阅读任务进行3项实验研究发现,和既懂手语又懂口语的(听力损失不高于70 d B的)中轻度聋生相比,(听力损失高于70 d B的)重度聋生对句尾助词"的"的句法信息加工尤其困难,他们对"是……的"句的句法意识较弱。本研究对重度聋生的书面语语法教学训练具有重要的心理学指导意义。     

Cross‐Linguistic Differences in Processing Double‐Embedded Relative Clauses: Working‐Memory Constraints or Language Statistics?

An English double‐embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self‐paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross‐linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect.     

Effects of antecedent order and semantic context on Chinese pronoun resolution

Three reading time experiments were conducted in order to examine the relative contributions of order of antecedents and semantic context to the resolution of temporarily ambiguous Chinese pronouns. These pronouns were ambiguous because each of them was preceded by two antecedents, both of which were likely candidates for coreference. The identity of the pronoun was revealed by subsequent disambiguating information that constrained the pronoun to one particular interpretation. Experiment 1 showed that reading of the disambiguating phrase was slower when the phrase confined the pronoun to the second rather than to the first antecedent. Experiment 2 produced the same effect of antecedent order (first vs. second antecedent) regardless of whether the target antecedent was an action-performing or an action-receiving entity. In Experiment 3, the order effect was eliminated by a biasing modifier inserted immediately before the pronoun. These results indicate that in a semantically neutral environment, the first-appearing antecedent is the preferred candidate for coreferencing the ambiguous Chinese pronoun. The interaction between order of antecedents and semantic context (in the form of preposed biasing modifiers) suggests that the initial comprehension of Chinese pronouns depends as much on contextual as on structural factors.     

Sentence Complexity and Working Memory Effects in Ambiguity Resolution

Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both offline RC attachment preferences and in online reading time measures, but no effects of syntactic complexity. In Experiment 2 (Korean), syntactic complexity due to greater distance between integrating heads, as measured by the dependency locality theory (Gibson in Cognition 68:1–76, 1998), significantly increased the proportion of attachment to NP1. However, no effects of working memory were found. The difference in results between English and Korean is proposed to be due to head-directionality effects. The results of our study support the conclusion that working memory-based accounts provide a better explanation than previous language-dependent accounts for differences in RC attachment preferences. We propose that previous language dependent-accounts of cross-linguistic differences in RC processing have overlooked the interaction between individual WMC and a language’s general structure, which is a central factor in RC attachment.     

The Use of Stereotypical Gender Information in Constructing a Mental Model: Evidence from English and Spanish

Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical gender of participants in a text influences comprehension. A self-paced reading task was used to present short texts comprising one, two, or three sentences. The first sentence of each text introduced a stereotypically masculine or feminine participant (e.g. doctor, nurse), or a neutral one. The last sentence introduced a pronoun (he/she) that could match or mismatch the gender of the referent. The first experiment, which was carried out in English, showed that reading times for the last sentence were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the pronoun in the last sentence and the stereotypical gender of the referent in the first sentence. In contrast to English, the gender of the participant can be disambiguated by a preceding article ( el / la ) in Spanish. The results of the second, third, and fourth experiments, which were carried out in Spanish, showed that reading times for the first sentences were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the article and the stereotypical gender of the participant. However, reading times for the last sentences did not differ. Overall, the results suggest that information about the stereotypical gender of the participants in a text is incorporated into the representation as soon as it becomes available, and that it affects the ease with which the text is understood.     

Building syntactic structures in speaking: a bilingual exploration

In a series of three experiments we investigated syntactic priming using a sentence recall task. Participants read and memorized a target sentence for later recall. After reading a prime sentence and engaging in a distraction task, they were asked to produce the target sentence aloud. Earlier investigations have shown that this task is sensitive to a syntactic priming effect. That is, the syntactic form of the prime sentence sometimes influences the syntactic form of the recalled target. In this paper we report on a variation on this task, using Spanish-English bilingual participants. In the first two experiments we replicated the prepositional phrase priming effect using English target sentences and Spanish prime sentences. In the final experiment we investigated two additional syntactic forms, using Spanish target sentences and English prime sentences. Implications for models of syntax generation and bilingual speech production are discussed.     

Syntactic priming effects in aphasia: an investigation of local syntactic dependencies

This study explored on-line processing of local syntactic dependencies in normal subjects and in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics using a lexical decision paradigm. In addition, subjects performed a grammatically judgement task on the real word pairs used in the lexical decision tasks. Results of two experiments for normal subjects indicated different syntactic priming effects as a function of the type of local syntactic dependency. Word pairs that formed a single constituent phrase, i.e., a verb phrase, showed both facilitory and inhibitory effects, whereas word pairs that reflected local syntactic dependencies across a phrase boundary, i.e., pronoun verb, showed only inhibitory effects. Broca's aphasics failed to show facilitory effects when presented with word pairs forming a single constituent phrase but, similar to normals, did show inhibition when presented with word pairs that reflected local syntactic dependencies across a phrase boundary. In contrast, Wernicke's aphasics failed to show inhibitory effects in both experiments. The implications of these results for theories of language processing deficits in aphasia are considered.     

Linguistic focus affects eye movements during reading

In two experiments, we explored how readers encode information that is linguistically focused. Subjects read sentences in which a word or phrase was focused by a syntactic manipulation (Experiment 1) or by a preceding context (Experiment 2) while their eye movements were monitored. Readers had longer reading times while reading a region of the sentence that was focused than when the same region was not focused. The results suggest that readers encode focused information more carefully, either upon first encountering it or during a second-pass reading of it. We conclude that the enhanced memory representations for focused information found in previous studies may be due in part to differences in reading patterns for focused information.     

The return of “visiting relatives”: Pragmatic effects in sentence processing

Two experiments were performed to investigate the role of syntactic and pragmatic cues on the disambiguation of noun phrases of the form VERB+ing NOUN+s, like visiting relatives, that can be interpreted as either singular or plural noun phrases. Both experiments used a self-paced reading task in which reading times were measured for two words, a verb and an adverb, immediately following the potentially ambiguous noun phrase. The interpretation of the noun phrase as singular or plural was biased by pragmatic cues in the first experiment and by syntactic cues in the second experiment. In both experiments, subjects were faster to read the adverb following the verb when the interpretation biased by the cues agreed in number with the verb that immediately followed the target noun phrase than when it did not agree with the verb. These results suggest that pragmatic cues, like syntactic cues, can be utilized rapidly in sentence processing.     

Accessing singular antecedents in conjoined phrases

Two experiments examined processing of singular pronouns when the antecedent (e.g., Mary) was a noun phrase (NP) in a conjoined phrase (e.g., Mary and John). Whole-sentence reading times showed an increase in processing time associated with splitting the conjoined phrase to access a single NP antecedent. The increase in processing occurred both when the antecedent was in the subject position and when it was in a nonsubject position. The source of the disruption was further investigated using eyetracking methods. Summing over regions of the text, the magnitude of the processing cost incurred by having to split a conjoined NP was closely comparable when there was and when there was not a gender-appropriate distracting potential antecedent. When there was no such potential antecedent, the increase in processing time occurred immediately in the pronoun region when eye movements were measured. In contrast, when there was a second discourse entity that matched the gender and number of the pronoun (but was not a plausible antecedent for the pronoun), eyetracking measures suggested that the processing difficulty was delayed until additional information was read that forced the antecedent to be one of the conjoined NPs. The results are interpreted in terms of Sanford and Garrod’s (1981) scenario-based model of text comprehension.