Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study

English and Italian provide some interesting contrasts that are relevant to a controversial problem in psycholinguistics: the boundary between grammatical and extra-grammatical knowledge in sentence processing. Although both are SVO word order languages without case inflections to indicate basic grammatical relations, Italian permits far more variation in word order for pragmatic purposes. Hence Italians must rely more than English listeners on factors other than word order. In this experiment, Italian and English adults were asked to interpret 81 simple sentences varying word order, animacy contrasts between the two nouns, topicalization and contrastive stress. Italians relied primarily on semantic strategies while the English listeners relied on word order—including a tendency to interpret the second noun as subject in non-canonical word orders (corresponding to word order variations in informal English production). Italians also made greater use of topic and stress information. Finally, Italians were much slower and less consistent in the application of word order strategies even for reversible NVN sentences where there was no conflict between order and semantics. This suggests that Italian is ‘less’ of an SVO language than English. Semantic strategies apparently stand at the ‘core’ of Italian to the same extent that word order stands at the ‘core’ of English. It is suggested that these results pose problems for claims about a ‘universal’ separation between semantics and syntax, and for theories that postulate a ‘universal’ priority of one type of information over another. Results are discussed in the light of the competition model, a functionalist approach to grammar that accounts in a principled way for probabilistic outcomes and differential ‘weights’ among competing and converging sources of information in sentence processing.     

Effects of Case Marking and Word Order on Sentence Parsing in Finnish: An Eye Fixation Analysis

Effects of case marking and word order on syntactic parsing in Finnish were examined by registering readers' eye fixation patterns while they read single sentences for comprehension. Target nouns appearing towards the beginning of the sentence took one of three grammatical roles: subject, object, or adverbial. The subject phrase in the sentence-initial position is the canonical order in Finnish, but the two other word orders are less frequent. In one experimental condition, the grammatical role of the target noun was signalled by a case inflection attached to the preceding adjective modifier; in the second condition this was not the case. The results showed a facilitation effect in sentence parsing due to case marking. Similarly, there was an effect of word order, where the canonical SVO order was associated with greater processing ease than were non-canonical word orders. The two factors interacted so that there was no effect of case marking for the SVO order, but a significant case marking effect for the two marked word orders. The same pattern of results showed up as both immediate and delayed effects. The results speak against the notion of head licensing proposed by Abney (1989) and Prichett (1991).     

An electrophysiological investigation of the effects of coreference on word repetition and synonymy

In two experiments the effects of word repetition, synonymy, and coreference on event-related brain potentials during text processing were studied. Participants read one (Experiment 1) or two sentence (Experiment 2) texts in which critical nouns were preceded by the definite (the) or indefinite (a) articles. Experiment 1 was run as a control to verify that differences in article processing in the second sentences of Experiment 2 would not contaminate the ERPs to critical noun items. They did not. In Experiment 2, an initial sentence was used to set up a context and contained either a first presentation or synonym of the critical word from the second sentence. N400 (but not Late Positive Component; LPC) priming effects were found for repetitions and synonyms (larger for repetitions) in second sentences. This extends observations of priming in word lists and single sentences to two-sentence texts. There was also a greater left anterior negativity or "LAN" for coreferential critical nouns (those following the article "The") compared to non-coreferential critical nouns (those following the article "A") suggesting that ERPs are sensitive to working memory processes engaged during referential assignment. In response to the articles themselves, there was a greater N400-700 elicited by the article "A" vs. "The." Finally, there was a greater N400-like negativity to the final words of non-coreferential sentences implying that the meanings of these sentences were difficult to integrate with the discourse level representation established by the prior sentence.     

Judgments of Grammaticality of Japanese Sentences Violating the Principle of Full Interpretation

Two experiments investigated the linguistic intuition of Japanese speakers in which they judged the grammaticality of sentences violating Chomsky's principle of Full Interpretation. Experiment 1 used bitransitive sentences, which included an extra argument that assumed a role of either subjective, dative, or objective on the one hand and that specified semantically a preceding argument or stood in par with it on the other. Findings showed that the speakers judged ungrammatical sentences involving a dative or an objective extra argument as more grammatical than those involving a subjective extra argument. Ungrammatical sentences with an extra specified argument were judged more grammatical than those with an extra par argument when the extra argument was objective. Experiment 2 used sentences that included a verbal noun (VN) comprising a noun followed by a verb, shita (did). Ungrammatical VN sentences contained two arguments given the same objective marker. These sentences were judged to be highly grammatical despite the violation of the principle. Findings suggest that speakers' actual knowledge of language is not fully consistent with the knowledge they are alleged by Chomsky to possess, including the principle of Full Interpretation.     

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments.     

What's different in second-language processing? Evidence from event-related brain potentials

German sentences which were either correct, contained a selectional restriction violation, or a word category violation were presented auditorily to 16 native speakers of German (L1 group) and to 16 native speakers of Russian, who had learned German after the age of 10 (L2 group). Semantic violations elicited an N400 effect for both groups, but with a reduced amplitude and a longer peak latency in the L2 group. Compared to correct sentences, sentences with a phrase structure violation elicited an early anterior negativity followed by a broad centro-parietal positivity in native speakers. By contrast, there was no differential modulation of the early anterior negativity in the L2 group. A late positivity was also elicited in the second language learners, but it was slightly delayed compared to that shown by native speakers. This pattern is discussed in terms of different degrees of automaticity with respect to the subprocesses involved in sentence comprehension.     

Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure

A lexical decision paradigm was used to examine syntactic influence on word recognition in sentences. Initial fragments of sentences were presented visually (CRT display) one word at a time (at reading speeds), from left to right. The string terminated with the appearance of a lexical decision target. The grammatical structure of the incomplete sentence affected lexical decision reaction time (RT). In Experiment 1, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced lower RTs than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/verb). In Experiment 2, transitive verb contexts followed by noun targets and subject noun phrase contexts followed by verb targets yielded lower RTs than did the opposite pairings. Similar contrasts for adjective targets did not yield comparable effects in Experiment 2, but did when the adjective was the head of a predictable phrase (Experiment 4). In Experiment 3, noun targets yielded lower RTs than did verb targets after contexts of a transitive verb followed by a prepositional phrase. An account of these effects is offered in terms of parsing constraints on phrasal categories.     

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。     

Judgments of grammaticality of sentences with a differing number of arguments: a comparison of English and Japanese speakers

This study explored native speakers' linguistic intuition as revealed in judging the grammaticality of sentences. Speakers of English (n = 36) and Japanese (n = 57) judged the relative grammaticality of sentences involving a verb which occurred together with one, two or three arguments. Findings showed that English speakers were more affected by the number of arguments in sentences. They judged sentences having three arguments as grammatical most often and ones having one or two arguments as grammatical less often. However, Japanese speakers gave rather similar and more grammatical judgments regardless of the number of arguments in sentences. The findings indicate a difference in tightness of argument structure in the two languages even when the sentences judged are simple sentences and they are given without any sentential context.     

Sensitivity to inflectional morphology in agrammatism: investigation of a highly inflected language

We present the results of a study with six Serbo-Croatian-speaking agrammatic patients on a test of inflectional morphology in which subjects judged whether spoken sentences were grammatical or ungrammatical. Sensitivity to two kinds of syntactic features was investigated in these aphasic patients: (1) subcategorization rules for transitive verbs (which must be followed by a noun in the accusative case; intransitive verbs can be followed by nouns in other noun cases); (2) sensitivity to the inflectional morphology marking noun case. The test items consisted of three-word sentences (noun-verb-noun) in which verb transitivity and appropriateness of the case inflection of the following noun were manipulated. Results of the grammaticality judgment task show that both syntactic properties are preserved in these patients.     

Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language

The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word categories--for example, words that follow the in English often belong to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be active in adults in an artificial language learning task.     

The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences describing events in which an individual performed an action with an implement. The noun phrase arguments of the verbs in the sentences were such that when thematic assignment occurred at the critical target word, the sentence was plausible (likely theme), implausible (unlikely theme), or anomalous (an inappropriate theme). Whereas the target word in the anomalous condition provided evidence of immediate disruption, the effect of the target word in the implausible condition was considerably delayed. The results thus indicate that when a word is anomalous, it has an immediate effect on eye movements, but that the effect of implausibility is not as immediate.     

Word Order Processing in a Second Language: From VO to OV

Event-related potential studies on second language processing reveal that L1/L2 differences are due either to proficiency, age of acquisition or grammatical differences between L1 and L2 (Kotz in Brain Lang 109(2–3):68–74, 2009). However, the relative impact of these and other factors in second language processing is still not well understood. Here we present evidence from behavioral and ERP experiments on Basque sentence word order processing by L1Spanish–L2Basque early bilinguals (Age of Aquisition  \(=\)  3 years) with very high proficiency in their L2. Results reveal that these L2 speakers have a preference towards canonical Subject–Object–Verb word order, which they processed faster and with greater ease than non-canonical Object–Subject–Verb. This result converges with the processing preferences shown by natives and reported in Erdocia et al. (Brain Lang 109(1):1–17, 2009). However, electrophysiological measures associated to canonical (SOV) and non-canonical (OSV) sentences revealed a different pattern in the non-natives, as compared to that reported previously for natives. The non-native group elicited a P600 component that native group did not show when comparing S and O at sentence’s second position. This pattern of results suggests that, despite high proficiency, non-native language processing recruits neural resources that are different from those employed in native languages.     

Memory effects in syntactic ERP tasks

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position. Grammaticality judgments were required at the end of the sentence. While the violations in both conditions result in the expected increase in the P600 component (reflecting the fact that the syntactic violation is being processed), the sentences with the sentence-medial critical word also result in a late frontal negativity effect. It is hypothesized that this effect is due to greater memory requirements that are needed to keep the violation in mind until a response can be made at the end of the sentence. The maintenance of the decision that a sentence is ungrammatical must be kept in memory longer for sentence-medial violations as opposed to when the violation occurs at the end of the sentence (immediately preceding the moment at which the judgment can be made).     

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.     

Production of non-canonical sentences in agrammatic aphasia: limits in representation or rule application?

The study reported here compares two linguistically informed hypotheses on agrammatic sentence production, the TPH [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397-425.] and the DOP [Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). Sentence production with verbs of alternating transitivity in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18, 59-66]. To explain impaired production of non-canonical sentences in agrammatism, the TPH basically relies on deleted or pruned clause structure positions in the left periphery, whereas the DOP appeals to limitations in the application of movement rules. Certain non-canonical sentences such as object-questions and object-relative clauses require the availability of nodes in the left periphery as well as movement to these nodes. In languages with relatively fixed word order such as English, the relevant test cases generally involve a coincidence of left periphery and movement, such that the predictions of the TPH and the DOP are identical although for different reasons. In languages with relatively free word order such as German, on the other hand, it is possible to devise specific tests of the different predictions due to the availability of scrambling. Scrambled object sentences, for example, do not involve the left periphery but do require application of movement in a domain below the left periphery. A study was conducted with German agrammatic subjects which elicited canonical sentences without object movement and non-canonical scrambled sentences with object movement. The results show that agrammatic speakers have a particular problem with the production of scrambled sentences. Further evidence reported in the study from spontaneous speech, elicitation of object relatives, questions and passives and with different agrammatic subjects confirms that non-canonical sentences are generally harder to produce for agrammatics. These findings provide evidence in favor of the DOP and it will be argued that a cross-modal explanation of agrammatic deficits is possible if two factors--movement and canonicity--are taken into consideration.     

Event-related brain potentials to grammatical errors and semantic anomalies

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects silently read several prose passages, presented one word at a time. Semantic anomalies and various grammatical errors had been inserted unpredictably at different serial positions within some of the sentences. The semantically inappropriate words elicited a large N400 component in the ERP, whereas the grammatical errors were associated with smaller and less consistent components that had scalp distributions different from that of the N400. This result adds to the evidence that the N400 wave is more closely related to semantic than to grammatical processing. Additional analyses revealed that different ERP configurations were elicited by open-class (“content”) and closed-class (“function”) words in these prose passages.     

Gender and lexical access in Bulgarian

Two procedures were used to explore the effects of semantic and grammatical gender on the recognition and processing of Bulgarian nouns, in relation to other factors that are known to affect lexical access. This study in a three-gender language was modeled on previous work in Italian, a two-gender language (Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, D'Amico, & Hernandez, 1995). Words were presented auditorily in randomized lists in two tasks: (1) repeat the word as quickly as possible and (2) determine the grammatical gender of the noun as soon as possible and indicate the decision by pressing a button. Reaction times in both tasks were influenced by phonological factors, word frequency, and irregularity of gender marking, but semantic and grammatical gender affected only gender monitoring. The significant contribution of semantic gender to processing in Bulgarian contrasts with previous findings for Italian. Also, we obtained an interaction between sex of the subject and noun gender, reflecting a bias toward one's own grammatical gender "counterpart" (especially for females). Reanalysis of the prior study in Italian showed a similar interaction but confirmed no effects of the semantic gender of the noun, suggesting that these two natural gender effects can dissociate. Possible reasons for cross-linguistic differences are discussed, with implications for comparative studies of gender and lexical access.     

The effect of grammatical complexity upon disfluency behavior of nonstuttering preschool children

The effect of grammatical complexity on the disfluency behavior of nonstuttering 3- and 4-yr-old children was examined. Thirty normal children repeated after the examiner 30 sentences which represented six different grammatical constructions. These grammatical constructions represented a range of grammatical complexity.The total number of disfluencies that occurred in each sentence type was compared. The occurrence of specific disfluency categories in each sentence type was also examined. Subjects produced significantly more disfluencies on passive sentences than on any other sentence type. The passive elicited significantly more interjections, word repetitions, and revisions than the other sentence types.The effect of sentence type on imitation performance was also examined. The auxiliary Have and negative sentence types elicited significantly more imitation errors than other sentence types. Initiation and fluency performance for individual subjects were also examined.The results of the present investigation suggest that when grammatical complexity is controlled, the relationship between disfluencies and grammatical complexity is complicated. When grammatical constructions were relatively difficult for children, complexity affected the occurrence of disfluencies. However, factors other than grammatical complexity affect the occurrence of disfluencies in pre-school children.