The correspondence between sentence production and corpus frequencies in modifier attachment

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (e.g., "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony."). On the basis of two corpus analyses and two sentence continuation tasks, we conclude that much research about this specific syntactic ambiguity has used complex noun phrases that are quite uncommon. These noun phrases involve the relationship between two humans and, at least in Dutch, induce a different attachment preference from noun phrases referring to non-human entities. We provide evidence that the use of this type of complex noun phrase may have distorted the conclusions about the processes underlying relative clause attachment. In addition, it is shown that, notwithstanding some notable differences between sentence production in the continuation task and in coherent text writing, there seems to be a remarkable correspondence between the attachment patterns obtained with both modes of production.     

The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases Time Course, and Effects of Overspecificity

Two experiments investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases, and in particular those thatcould only be linked to their antecedents via knowledge-based inferences. The first experiment showed that much of the inferential processing was carried out as the anaphoric noun phrase was read, although there was some indication that inferential processing continued to the end of the clause. The second experiment attempted to establish why anaphoric noun phrases that are more specific than their antecedents cause problems. It showed that the difficulty did not lie in adding the extra information carried by the anaphor to the representation of the referent. Rather, we suggest, putting extra information in the anaphoric noun phrase disrupts the process of linking that noun phrase to its antecedent.     

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.     

Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-established preference of Spanish to adjoin the relative clause high in the tree (to servant instead of actress in the example above). We manipulated the valence and arousal of the lexical entities residing in the NP. Our results indicate that (a) the inclusion of either pleasant or unpleasant words induces changes in the usual NP1 preference found in Spanish; (b) the effects of high-arousal words are especially clear, in that they pull RC adjunction towards the NP where they are located, be it the NP1 or the NP2; and (c) in the context of sentence production, these kinds of words seem intense enough to promote changes in (and even reverse) a solid syntactic bias. We discuss these findings in the light of existing theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution.     

Relative Clause Attachment: Nondeterminism in Japanese Parsing

Like many other languages, Japanese is ambiguous about the potential attachment sites of a relative clause which appears alongside a complex noun phrase. One important class of parsing theories (nondeterministic accounts) predicts that the relative clause will initially be attached to the first available host and later assigned to an alternative site, following the intervention of certain discourse processes. An alternative (deterministic) account maintains that the preliminary attachment site remains unchanged throughout the course of processing the sentence. The results of a questionnaire and a self-paced reading study with Japanese materials of this kind provided evidence of phased attachment first to one noun host and then to another. It is argued that these results are compatible only with nondeterministic accounts of parsing.     

Unforced Revision in Processing Relative Clause Association Ambiguity in Japanese: Evidence Against Revision as Last Resort

The current study tackles a long standing question of whether comprehenders perform structural revision when it is not forced by grammar or not. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we addressed this issue by making use of global structural ambiguity in Japanese. Our results show that comprehenders initially associate a relative clause with the first potential head noun and that they revise this analysis when the second noun is lexico-semantically possible as the relative clause head, but do not when it is impossible. The results are incompatible with the Revision as Last Resort hypothesis. Instead, they support the parsing with unforced revision that is immediately sensitive to lexical properties. We argue that our results cannot be accounted for by serial modular processing models but that they can be explained by ranked-parallel interactive processing models. Furthermore, we propose that head-finality is a key factor involved in the availability of unforced revision.     

Learning To Parse?

A strong claim about human sentence comprehension is that the processing mechanism is fully innate and applies differently to different languages only to the extent that their grammars differ. If so, there is hope for an explanatory project which attributes all parsing strategies to fundamental design characteristics of the parsing device. However, the whole explanatory program is in peril because of the discovery (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988) that Late Closure is not universal: Spanish, and also Dutch and other languages, favor Early Closure (high attachment) where English favors Late Closure flow attachment). I argue that the universal parser can weather this storm. Exceptions to Late Closure in Spanish and other languages are observed only in one construction (a relative clause attaching into a complex noun phrase [NP]), which is borderline in English too. For other constructions, low attachment is preferred in all languages tested. I propose that what differentiates the complex NP construction is the heaviness of the attachee compared to that of the host configuration. A relative clause is a heavy attachee, and the lower NP alone is small as a host; the relative is therefore better balanced if the whole complex NP is its host. A wide range of facts is accounted for by the principle that a constituent likes to have a sister of its own size. Light constituents will tend to attach low, and heavy ones to attach high, since larger constituents are dominated by higher nodes. A preference for balanced weight is familiar from work on prosodic phrasing. I suggest, therefore, that prosodic processing occurs in parallel with syntactic processing (even in reading) and influences structural ambiguity resolution. Height of attachment ambiguities are resolved by the prosodically motivated same-size-sister constraint. The exceptional behavior of English may be due to its prosodic packaging of a relative pronoun with the adjacent noun, overriding the balance tendency. If this explanation is correct, it is possible that all cross-language variations in parsing preferences are due to cross-language variations in the prosodic component of the competence grammar.     

The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions.     

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.     

汉语主、宾关系从句加工难度及其核心名词生命性效应

采用眼动追踪实验技术,考查了核心名词生命性取向对汉语主、宾关系从句加工难度调节效应。结果显示:(1)核心名词生命性格局对汉语主、宾关系从句的加工难度有着显著调节作用,具体表现为:当主、从句中的核心名词为"生命性-非生命性"格局时,在主句核心名词、核心动词位置,宾语关系从句加工较为容易;当主、从句中的核心名词为"非生命性-生命性"格局时,在上述位置,两种关系从句加工难度差异不显著;(2)汉语主、宾关系从句加工中核心名词生命性效应主要发生在语义信息提取、论元关系建构阶段,体现出汉语语言的特异性。上述结果支持了题元切适性理论。     

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).     

Asyntactic thematic role assignment by Mandarin aphasics: a test of the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis and the Double Dependency Hypothesis

This study examines the comprehension patterns of various sentence types by Mandarin-speaking aphasic patients and evaluates the validity of the predictions from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH). Like English, the canonical word order in Mandarin is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the head noun precedes the relative clause in English, but it follows the relative clause in Chinese. According to the Default Principle as stated in the TDH, the word order discrepancy will make subject relative clauses more difficult to comprehend for Mandarin agrammatics than object relative clauses, but the DDH predicts that agrammatic patients from the two languages have the same pattern of selective deficits. The results of this study support the prediction of the TDH.     

Singular and Plural Pronominal Reference in Spanish

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments, we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses containing overt and null pronouns. In both experiments, antecedents appeared in a single phrase (John met Mary) or in a conjoined phrase (John and Mary met). In Experiment 1, we compared reading times of sentences containing singular overt and null pronouns referring to the first or to the second mentioned antecedent. Overt pronouns caused a processing delay relative to null pronouns when they referred to the first antecedent in single but not in conjoined phrases. In Experiment 2, we compared reading times of sentences containing overt and null pronouns referring to singular or plural entities. Plural null pronouns were read faster than their singular counterparts in conjoined conditions. Plural overt pronouns were read more slowly than their null counterparts both in single and conjoined conditions. We explain our findings in a framework based on the notion of balance between processing cost and discourse function in line with the Informational Load Hypothesis.     

Testing the online reading effects of emotionality on relative clause attachment

Previous research has shown the impact of the emotional dimension of nouns (i.e., valence and arousal) on the completion of relative clauses (RC) that are preceded by a double antecedent [e.g.,: Someone shot the servant (the first noun phrase, NP1) of the actress (the second noun phrase, NP2) who was on the balcony] (Fraga et al. in Q J Exp Psychol 65:1740–1759, 2012). The present study explored for the first time the role of emotional valence, specifically emotional positive nouns, on RC disambiguation in a self-paced reading experiment. Two types of NP1–NP2 relationships were compared: emotional–neutral vs. neutral–emotional. Results showed NP1 preferences in the emotional–neutral condition, whereas no preferences were found in the neutral–emotional condition. We conclude that during reading, the emotional properties of nouns play a role in disambiguation preferences: RC attachment preferences can be neutralized when emotional factors are manipulated. The results are discussed within the framework of current models of sentence processing and with reference to the controversial differences between comprehension and production.     

In search of referents for nouns and pronouns

In comprehending a sentence, people normally try to identify the objects, events, and states referred to by its definite noun phrases. In Experiment 1, subjects took less time comprehending a sentence when the referents of such noun phrases were mentioned one sentence back than when they were mentioned two or three sentences back. There appeared to be a discontinuity between the first and second sentences back. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that it was most likely the first clause back, not the first sentence back, that was critical. These findings suggest that, independent of other factors, the last clause processed grants the entities it mentions a privileged place in working memory. They are readily available to be referred to by nouns and pronouns.     

Interpreting conjoined noun phrases and conjoined clauses: Collective versus distributive preferences

Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favours a single event (collective) interpretation, while introducing them in separate clauses favours a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgements were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events versus a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects' referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately-in distinct clauses as "split" antecedents.     

A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English

The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner variant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of opposing determiner forms by a noun’s grammatical properties leads to slower naming latencies in a picture naming task, as does the activation of opposing forms by the interaction between a noun’s gender and the phonological context. The present paper addresses the question of whether phonological context alone is sufficient to evoke competition between determiner forms. Participants produced English phrases in which a noun phrase’s phonology required a determiner that was the same as or differed from the determiner required by the noun itself (e.g., a purple giraffe; an orange giraffe). Naming latencies were slower when the phrase-initial determiner differed from the determiner required by the noun in isolation than when the phrase-initial determiner matched the isolated-noun determiner. This was true both for definite and indefinite determiners. The data show that during the production of a determiner–noun phrase, nouns automatically activate the phonological forms of their determiners, which can compete with the phonological forms that are generated by an assimilation rule.     

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.     

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.     

Syntactic structure and the garden path

The experiment investigated locally ambiguous English sentences containing “complement” verbs such as believe, which can be followed either by a direct object or by a complement clause. These two sentence types were compared with unambiguous sentences in which the complement clause was introduced by the word that. Subjects processed numerous examples of these sentences in a word-by-word self-paced reading task. At the disambiguation point after the ambiguous noun phrase, longer reading times were obtained for reduced complement constructions compared with direct object sentences. Such an effect has been attributed to the operation of the parsing principle Minimal Attachment (Frazier and Rayner, 1982). This principle predicts that subjects assume falsely that the noun phrase after the complement verb in the reduced complement constructions is the direct object, resulting in the need for subsequent structural reanalysis. However, longer times in the disambiguating zone were also found for the unambiguous that complements. Thus, the complexity difference seems not to represent “garden-pathing” as a result of the operation of Minimal Attachment, but may instead reflect the extra complexity caused by having to handle two sets of clausal relations instead of just one.