Priority Information Used for the Processing of Japanese Sentences: Thematic Roles,Case Particles or Grammatical Functions?

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with ditransitive verbs in the second experiment. Errors were made with scrambled sentences more than canonical sentences in both experiments, which suggested that scrambling effects were apparent in active sentences. Passive sentences in the third experiment indicated that canonical order defined based on case particles, not thematic roles, was more quickly and accurately identified than scrambled order. Potential sentences in the fourth experiment and causative sentences in the fifth experiment indicated that the processing of scrambled sentences based on grammatical functions, but not on case particles, required longer reaction times and resulted in higher error rates than canonical sentences. Consequently, scrambling effects in the present study indicated that neither thematic roles nor case particles can provide fully-satisfactory information for canonical phrase order, and that only grammatical functions offer satisfactory information in all types of sentences.     

Event-related brain indices of Japanese scrambling

This study examined the processing of Japanese wh-questions with preposed (scrambled) vs. in-situ (canonical SOV word order) wh-objects, and of yes/no-questions with scrambled vs. in-situ demonstrative objects. Questions with scrambled objects elicited bilateral slow anterior negative potentials between filler and gap. Scrambled demonstratives elicited P600 effects following the filler and (L)AN/P600 effects at the gap, while scrambled wh-words elicited primarily (L)AN effects at the gap. This replicated effects in response to filler-gap dependencies created by wh-movement in other languages, supporting the existence of universal parsing operations for all types of filler-gap dependencies. We suggest that these results are most generally compatible with notions of canonicity in sentence processing.     

Gapping: Electrophysiological evidence for immediate processing of "missing" verbs in sentence comprehension

In the present study we use event related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of identification and resolution of verb gaps. ERPs were recorded while participants read sentences that contained a verb gap like Ron took/sanded the planks, and Bill ? the hammer... Plausibility of the critical words (hammer) that followed the verb gap was manipulated. Relative to the plausible control (preceded by took), ERPs to the critical word in the implausible condition (preceded by sanded) showed an N400, followed by a positivity (P600). ERPs to determiners following gapped verbs showed a negativity between 100 and 300 ms, and a positivity between 300 and 500 ms compared to determiners in non-gapping constructions. These results suggest that the sentence processor recognizes a verb gap and reconstructs the verb information at the earliest possible occasion, and that this reconstruction process is different from the reconstruction of antecedents in other filler-gap constructions (e.g., WH gaps).     

Children’s On-line Processing of Scrambling in Japanese

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in comprehending scrambled sentences when they were provided as reversible sentences. The reversibility effect was significant for children, whereas the interaction of reversibility and a filler-gap dependency was significant for adults. However, this does not indicate that children’s parsing is fundamentally different from that of adults. For those children who processed the nominative and accusative case markers equally fast, the reactivation of the dislocated constituent was observed in the gap position. These results suggest that children’s processing is basically the same as adults’ in that their sentence processing is incremental and they parse a gap to form a filler-gap dependency.     

Click location in sentences: A test of the linguistic competence of seven-year-old fluent and disfluent males

Ten fluent and ten disfluent 7-yr-old males were presented simple and complex fully grammatical, anomalous and scrambled sentences. A click (35-msec 1-kHz tone burst) had been superimposed within three positions to the right or left of the major syntactic boundary in each sentence. The subjects heard the sentence, repeated the sentence, and marked on a preprinted version of the sentence where they heard the click. It was expected that children with greater language facility would more probably locate the click veridically. By the same reasoning, less complex syntactic structures should be expected to influence click placement less than more complex utterances. The following results were obtained: (a) the disfluent group gave a greater number of correct responses than the fluent group; (b) more correct responses were observed for simple sentences than for complex sentences for both groups; and (c) fewer correct responses were observed for both simple and complex grammatical sentences than for anomalous and scrambled sentence types.     

Sentence Comprehension Is Mediated by Content-Addressable Memory Structures

Studies of working memory demonstrate that some forms of information are retrieved by a content-addressable mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1989; McElree, 1996, 1998), whereas others require a slower search-based mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1993). Measures of the speed and accuracy of processing sentences with filler-gap dependencies demonstrate that the probability of maintaining a representation of a filler item decreases as additional material is processed, but that the speed with which a preserved representation is accessed is unaffected by the amount of interpolated material. These results suggest that basic binding operations in sentence comprehension are mediated by a content-addressable memory system.     

The use of syntactic information in filling gaps

Two sentence-comprehension time experiments replicated and extended previously reported research indicating that readers initially make a quick, heuristic assignment of fillers to gaps in temporarily ambiguous sentences such as “Who did John beg to sing?” and “Who did John beg to sing for?” The Most Recent Filler heuristic readers seemed to adopt made the former “distant filler” sentence harder to comprehend than the latter “recent filler” sentence. Readers did not in general use all available sources of information in making this assignment. In particular, they usually delayed their use of verb control information so that substituting the unambiguous-control verbs “force” or “begin” for “beg” did not eliminate the distant filler inferiority. the experiments counter some criticisms that have been made of the previously reported research. The possibility that readers delay using an interesting natural category of information was raised, and its implications for the mental grammar were considered.     

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.     

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Children’s Sentence Processing

The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children’s more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5–7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically significant interaction between the participants’ working memory span and antecedent reactivation: High-span children (n = 19) and high-span adults (n = 22) showed evidence of antecedent priming at the gap site, while for low-span children and adults, there was no such effect. The antecedent priming effect in the high-span participants indicates that in both children and adults, dislocated arguments access their antecedents at gap positions. The absence of an antecedent reactivation effect in the low-span participants could mean that these participants required more time to integrate the dislocated constituent and reactivated the filler later during the sentence.     

Storage and integration in the processing of filler-gap dependencies: an ERP study of topicalization and wh-movement in German

We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the processing of unambiguous German sentences containing different types of filler-gap dependency. Both topicalization constructions and wh-questions were found to elicit a left-anterior negativity (LAN) prior to the processing of the subcategorizing verb, relative to a gap-free control condition. At the subcategorizing verb, sentences containing a wh-dependency produced a parietal positivity (P600) relative to topicalization structures. These results support the claim that separable parsing processes are involved in the processing of syntactic dependencies, with working memory based processes being reflected in an LAN, and the relative difficulty of integrating the filler with its subcategorizer reflected in a P600. Integration cost but not memory cost was found to be influenced by the type of filler-gap dependency involved.     

Sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease: the role of attention and memory.

Sentence comprehension is a complex process involving at least attentional, memory, grammatical, and semantic components. We report three experiments designed to evaluate the impairments underlying sentence comprehension difficulties in nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). In the first experiment, we asked patients to answer simple questions about sentences which varied in terms of grammatical complexity and semantic constraint. We found that PD patients are significantly compromised in their ability to perform this task. Their difficulties became more prominent as grammatical complexity increased, but they were significantly assisted by semantic constraints that limited possible interpretations of a sentence. Analyses of individual patient profiles revealed heterogeneous performance across the group of PD patients and somewhat inconsistent performance for patients across testing sessions. In the second experiment, we tested the possibility that patients' heterogeneous performance on the sentence comprehension task is due to an impairment in memory or attention, cognitive domains known to be compromised in some PD patients. Although PD patients and control subjects differed on one memory measure, there were no significant correlations between attention and memory performance and the results of the sentence comprehension task. In the final experiment, we manipulated the sentences used in the first experiment in a fashion that stressed the need for memory and attention in a sentence. The results indicated that PD patients are significantly compromised in their ability to attend to certain critical grammatical features of a sentence. A regression analysis identified specific grammatical, semantic, and attentional mechanisms as significant contributors to PD patients' overall sentence comprehension, accounting for over 97% of the variance in their performance. We conclude that there are multiple sources of cognitive difficulty underlying PD patients' sentence comprehension impairment.     

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.     

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.     

The resolution and recovery of filler-gap dependencies in aphasia: evidence from on-line anomaly detection

This study examines the on-line processing of sentences with movement using an auditory anomaly detection task (after Borland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995). Eight agrammatic aphasic participants (four of whom had undergone treatment focused on comprehension and production of filler-gap sentences) and 24 young normal participants listened to sentences and pressed a button when the sentences "stopped making sense." Critical sentences contained an anomaly in object relative clauses or conjoined clauses. Results showed that both young normals and aphasic participants were able to reject anomalous sentences of both types. In addition, both groups showed evidence of filler-gap resolution on-line. Importantly, however, there was evidence of a treatment effect for the aphasic patients: those who received treatment showed better performance than those who had not. Treated patients were more successful than the untreated patients in detecting the anomaly in filler-gap conditions, rejecting the anomalous filler-gap sentences reliably more often than the non-anomalous ones, like the young normals. This effect was not noted for untreated participants, i.e., there was no statistical difference between their rejection of anomalous and non-anomalous filler gap sentences. Further, the reaction time data showed that the treated aphasic patients' rejections came before sentence's end (within 2000 ms), while the majority of responses made by untreated patients did not. These results indicate that individuals with agrammatic aphasia appear to retain some gap-filling capacity and that treatment can improve their ability to make use of this capacity.     

Syntactic working memory and the establishment of filler-gap dependencies: insights from ERPs and fMRI

In this contribution, we review an ERP experiment and an fMRI experiment which investigated the processing of German wh-questions. On the basis of the ERP results, we will discuss current models of sentence processing and resource distribution during sentence comprehension. We argue that there exists a separate cognitive or neural resource that supports syntactic working memory processes necessary for the temporary maintenance of syntactic information for the parser. In the context of wh-movement, such a memory component is necessary for establishing filler-gap dependencies. The data obtained from the fMRI experiment will be used to discuss the results of previous neuroimaging studies of sentence processing. It is claimed that syntactic working memory, rather than syntactic processing per se, is supported by Broca's Area.     

Are verbs tensed or tenseless?

Conclusion We have seen that we cannot de-tense a sentence like (15) simply by changing its verb, since the tense of such a sentence is determined by a temporal adverb. More importantly, we have seen that de-tensing is a process of removing certain temporal restrictions from the truth-conditions of tensed sentences, and that tensed and tenseless forms of a verb do not differ in sense. Once we understand this, and once we realize that it is an historical accident that the tense of sentences in English if often indicated by means of the grammatical device of inflecting verbs, tensed verbs no longer seem to be the sort of item that needs to be purged from ordinary language in constructing its tenseless analogue. Indeed, although the distinction between tensed and tenseless verbs may still be of philosophic interest, this distinction hardly seems to deserve the pivotal role assigned to it in the literature.     

The role of the verb in sentence memory

Investigators have frequently found that nouns are more important than verbs in the memory representation of sentences. This pattern of results is incompatible with recent theories of sentence memory that have emphasized the verb and with the results of sentence comprehension studies that have demonstrated the importance of the verb. The four experiments reported here were designed to reexamine the role of the verb in sentence memory. Linguistic variables other than sentence function were held constant in three studies. Verbs were recalled as well and were as effective retrieval cues as nouns in these experiments. The to-be-remembered sentences were presented in the context of paragraphs in the fourth experiment. This reduced the difference in level of recall between subjects, verbs, and objects. The conclusion was drawn that the verb is no less important than sentence nouns in the memory representation.     

汉语句子可继续性对句子理解加工的即时影响

通过操纵动词与后接词的关系,来产生搭配异常并控制句子的可继续性,研究汉语词汇信息在句子加工中的即时作用。实验一利用跨通道技术,发现动一名词搭配异常对目标名词的加工有即时影响,形容词条件下可继续性对目标形容词的加工有即时影响;实验二采用眼动技术,发现名词条件和形容词条件下可继续性均有显著的即时影响。结果显示,语义等多种词汇信息被通达后立即共同参与了汉语句子加工。     

Pre- and Post-head Processing for Single- and Double-Scrambled Sentences of a Head-Final Language as Measured by the Eye Tracking Method

Using the eye-tracking method, the present study depicted pre- and post-head processing for simple scrambled sentences of head-final languages. Three versions of simple Japanese active sentences with ditransitive verbs were used: namely, (1) $\text{ SO }_{\!1\!}\text{ O }_{\!2\!}\text{ V }$ canonical, (2) $\text{ SO }_{\!2\!}\text{ O }_{\!1\!}\text{ V }$ single-scrambled, and (3) $\text{ O }_{\!1\!}\text{ O }_{\!2\!}\text{ SV }$ double-scrambled order. First pass reading times indicated that the third noun phrase just before the verb in both single- and double-scrambled sentences required longer reading times compared to canonical sentences. Re-reading times (the sum of all fixations minus the first pass reading) showed that all noun phrases including the crucial phrase before the verb in double-scrambled sentences required longer re-reading times than those required for single-scrambled sentences; single-scrambled sentences had no difference from canonical ones. Therefore, a single filler-gap dependency can be resolved in pre-head anticipatory processing whereas two filler-gap dependencies require much greater cognitive loading than a single case. These two dependencies can be resolved in post-head processing using verb agreement information.     

言语工作记忆、句子理解与句法依存关系加工

言语工作记忆在句子理解中作用的机制和性质,是当前认知神经科学研究的一个中心课题。文章首先回顾了与支撑语言理解的工作记忆资源的性质有关的理论争论和实验证据,然后回顾了填充语-空位依存关系加工这一能够揭示言语工作记忆与句子理解之间关系的重要领域,最后简要展望了今后应该进一步研究的几个问题