Children's comprehension of complex sentences

Four tasks were given to children from 4–12 to test their comprehension of complex sentences containing main verbs taking underlying sentences as their complements (Sally knew that she was early). In an imperatives task, very young children interpreted only the complement verb and ignored the complex verb. In a short-term memory task, sentences with two negations usually lost the second not in recall. In direct questioning and anomaly-detection tasks, children tended to make pragmatic inferences and excessively depend on knowledge about the world, as opposed to linguistic information. Overall results showed that even sixth graders had not yet attained adult-level comprehension of complex sentences.     

Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice sentences. Following 10 story sessions, children's production and comprehension of passives were assessed. Intervention type affected performance--children who heard stories with passive sentences produced more passive constructions (and with fewer mistakes) and showed higher comprehension scores than children who heard stories with active sentences. Theoretical implications of these results for the understanding of the nature of syntactic skills and practical implications for the development of preschool materials are discussed.     

The Effect of Phonemic Repetition on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: Implications for Models of Working Memory

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured. Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared to reading time on unambiguous control sentences. Sentences either did or did not contain repeated phonemes. The results showed that reading time was longer for sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity than for unambiguous control sentences. Reading time was also longer on sentences containing repeated phonemes than on sentences that did not contain repeated phonemes. Phonemic repetition did not increase the time taken for syntactic ambiguity resolution; rather, the effects of syntactic ambiguity and phonemic repetition were temporally distinct, with the effect of phonemic repetition following the effect of syntactic ambiguity. Implications for theories of working memory are discussed.     

Lexical information drives perceptual learning of distorted speech: evidence from the comprehension of noise-vocoded sentences

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was enhanced if listeners heard distorted sentences while they knew the identity of the undistorted target (Experiments 2 and 3). Learning was absent when listeners were trained with nonword sentences (Experiments 4 and 5), although the meaning of the training sentences did not affect learning (Experiment 5). Perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech depends on higher level information, consistent with top-down, lexically driven learning. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation.     

Accessing ambiguous words during sentence comprehension

In five experiments visual processing of sentences containing either a more frequent or a less frequent usage of an ambiguous word was examined. When prior or subsequent context was pragmatically related to the relevant sense of the ambiguous word, sentences intending the more frequent sense produced longer ambiguity detection times and shorter immediate comprehension times than sentences intending the less frequent sense. This relative frequency effect was not obtained in comprehension of corresponding unambiguous sentences containing relatively high or low frequency unambiguous synonyms of the senses. These results suggest that access of ambiguous word-senses tends to occur in order of relative frequency, and that multiple access of senses tends only to occur for low frequency usages. When the preceding verb imposed selection constraints on which sense could follow, the frequency effect did not occur consistently; and it was virtually eliminated when biasing context took the form of a previous sentence containing an unambiguous synonym of the relevant sense. Implications for models of access of unambiguous words in sentences, as well as for models of processing ambiguous sentences, are considered.     

The relationship between field independence and sentence disambiguation ability

The relationship between field independence and ability to disambiguate sentences was ivestigated. Sixty-nine college students were administered the Components test of the Flanagan Aptitude Classification Tests as a measure of field independence. Sixty ambiguous sentences, consisting of 15 each of lexical, surface structure, underlying structure, and multiple ambiguity types, were used to assess ability to disambiguate sentences. Results revealed a moderate positive correlation between field independence and sentence disambiguation ability. This relationship suggests (1) that field independence is not a cognitive style limited only to perceptual restructuring processes and (2) that sentential disambiguation processes are not solely a function of linguistic competence.     

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 underlying structures of sentences are the primary units of immediate speech processing

Two studies of the subjective location of clicks in spoken sentences indicate: (1) within-clause phrase structure boundaries do not significantly affect the segmentation of spoken sentences; (2) divisions between underlying structure sentences determine segmentation even in the absence of corresponding explicit clause divisions in the surface phrase structure. These results support a model of speech processing according to which listeners actively segment and organize spoken sequences into potential underlying syntactic structures.     

Structured propostions and sentence structure

It is argued that taken together, two widely held claims ((i) sentences express structured propositions whose structures are functions of the structures of sentences expressing them; and (ii) senteces have underlying structures that are the input to semantic interpretation) suggest a simple, plausible theory of propositional structure. According to this theory, the structures of propositions are the same as the structures of the syntactic inputs to semantics they are expressed by. The theory is defended against a variety of objections.I have benefitted from discussions with Michael Jubien, Michacl Liston, Paul Teller, Howard Wettstein, Mark Wilson and especially David Copp. The comments of Mark Richard and an anonymous referee for Journal of Philosophical Logic on an earlier draft resulted in a much improved paper. Various circumstances resulted in this paper appearing after King [1995], though the latter was written later and amends the present view in several ways. See notes 9, 13, 15 and 33 of King [1995].     

A Neuronal Basis for the Fan Effect

The fan effect says that “activation” spreading from a concept is divided among the concepts it spreads to. Because this activation is not a physical entity, but an abstraction of unknown lower‐level processes, the spreading activation model has predictive but not explanatory power. We provide one explanation of the fan effect by showing that distributed neuronal memory networks (specifically, Hopfield networks) reproduce four qualitative aspects of the fan effect: faster recognition of sentences containing lower‐fan words, faster recognition of sentences when more cues are provided, faster acceptance of studied sentences than rejection of probes, and faster recognition of sentences studied more frequently. These are all a natural result of the dynamics of distributed associative memory.     

Children's recall of contextually integrable and nonintegrable episodic events

The hypothesis of this study is that children's deficiency in encoding input information may be attributed partially to a failure to fully integrate target and contextual information. Second and fourth grade children and college adults were shown sentences varying in internal integrability in a cued recall task for target nouns in the sentences. The sentences were internally semantically Congruous, Incongruous, or Anomalous. In acquisition, the subjects were told either to read the sentences (Read Encoding) or to rate the likelihood of the occurrence of the sentential event (Integration Encoding). The results showed large developmental differences in both levels of recall and the Congruity effect (superior recall for the Congruous relative to the Anomalous sentences) in the Read condition. These differences were minimized in the Integration condition. These patterns suggest young children are deficient in the contextual integration of episodic events, and, as a result, make inefficient use of semantic information in the encoding of input information.     

Evidence for language recoding in autistic, retarded and normal children: a re-examination

In a replication and extension of earlier studies by Hermelin & O'Connor, language recoding abilities in autistic, retarded and normal children matched for mental age and digit span, were compared in a verbal recall task. Random word lists, sentences, and anomalous sentences, eight or 12 items in length (for high and low memory span subgroups) were presented and the number of words recalled from each type of input was scored. All low span children recalled sentences better than random lists with normal children superior to retarded and autistic children and the latter group poorer than the retarded group. Autistic children showed a recency effect with both types of input. There were no group differences amongst high span children and sentences were again better recalled than random lists. In Expt II sentences were better recalled than anomalous sentences, with autistic and retarded children equivalent in performance and poorer than normal children. Although low span autistic children were clearly deficient in recall of sentence material when compared with the two control groups, the effect of conditions showed that they were able to use structure to improve recall. Since high span autistic children did not perform differently from controls it is suggested that results from this kind of study may not be generalizable, and that claims for a specific coding deficit in autistic children need further substantiation.     

Queer sentences,ambiguity, and levels of processing

Subjects judged linguistic strings "meaningful" or "meaningless." Meaningful sentences were identical for all subjects; however, for each of five groups, meaningless foils containing different kinds of linguistic violation were interspersed among the meaningful sentences. Type of foil influenced processing time for meaningful items, suggesting that laboratory language processing may be determined by the entire set of linguistic materials used. Effect of foil type on comprehension depth for meaningful items was assessed from the extent to which three kinds of ambiguity slowed judgments on those items as compared to unambiguous sentences. Foil type appears to affect depth of meaningful sentence processing in such a way as to support a "levels of analysis" view of sentence comprehension. Foil type and kind of ambiguity interacted to suggest that sentence comprehension requires computation of underlying logical relationships prior to computation of surface structural relationships and the unequivocal determination of word meanings.     

量词肯定句和否定句的理解

本研究试图探索人们对舍有“所有”、“每一个”、“有一些”等量词的肯定句、否定句和双重否定句的理解。要求成人被试尽快判断呈现在计算机屏幕上的句子和哪一幅图画的内容相符。结果表明,影响反应时的因素为(1)句子的表层结构和它的底层意义的一致程度;(2)句子的意义和从图画中得出的命题的一致程度;(3)句子中使用的量词。结果还表明,否定句的判断时间不一定全都比肯定句的长。     

Activations of "motor" and other non-language structures during sentence comprehension

In this paper we report the results of an experiment in which subjects read syntactically unambiguous and ambiguous sentences which were disambiguated after several words to the less likely possibility. Understanding such sentences involves building an initial structure, inhibiting the non-preferred structure, detecting that later input is incompatible with the initial structure, and reactivating the alternative structure. The ambiguous sentences activated four areas more than the unambiguous sentences. These areas are the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the right basal ganglia (BG), the right posterior dorsal cerebellum (CB) and the left median superior frontal gyrus (SFG). The left IFG is normally activated when syntactic processing complexity is increased and probably supports that function in the current study as well. We discuss four hypotheses concerning how these areas may support comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences. (1) The left IFG, right CB and BG could support articulatory rehearsal used to support the processing of ambiguous sentences. This seems unlikely since the activation pattern associated with articulatory rehearsal in other studies is not similar to that seen here. (2) The CB acts as an error detector in motor processing. Error detection is important for recognizing that the wrong sentence structure has been chosen initially. (3) The BG acts to select and sequence movements in the motor domain and in cognitive domains may serve to inhibit competing and completed plans which is not unlike inhibiting the initially non-preferred structure or "unchoosing" the initial choice when incompatible syntactic input is received. (4) The left median SFG is relevant for the evaluation of plausibility. Evaluating the plausibility of the two possibilities provides an important basis for choosing between them. The notion of the use of domain general cognitive processes to support a linguistic process is in line with recent suggestions that the a given area may subserve a specific cognitive task because it carries out an appropriate sort of computation rather than because it supports a specific cognitive domain.     

To end ambiguous sentences

A study of the time required to complete ambiguous sentences suggested that: even though Ss are unaware of the ambiguity while completing sentences, they take more time to complete ambiguous sentences than unambiguous ones: the degree of difficulty in completing ambiguous sentences is related to the linguistic level at which the ambiguity occurs: sentences containing two ambiguities are more difficult to complete than those containing only one, and when these two ambiguities occur at different linguistic levels, these sentences are harder to complete than when both occur within the same linguistic level: ambiguity may affect the grammaticality and relevance of completions; and may cause stuttering and laughter, even without awareness of the ambiguity. An attempt to fit these results to several theories of the processing of ambiguous sentences led us to the conclusion that ambiguity interferes with our understanding of a single meaning of a sentence, and that the degree of interference varies with the linguistic level at which the ambiguity occurs.     

In search of ambiguity

A study of the time required for Ss to perceive the two meanings of ambiguous sentences, supports the following conclusions: (I) Perception time (PT) is a function of the type of ambiguity, three of which are defined in this study. (2) A similar relative function was obtained for thePT in sentences with more than one ambiguity and for sentences with only a single ambiguity. (3) ThePT for finding a single ambiguity in such multiply ambiguous sentences was significantly longer than in singly ambiguous sentences. (4) When one of the interpretations of certain types of ambiguous sentences is less likely than the other (where likeliness is defined in terms of the number of Ss perceiving that inter-pretation first)PT is high. (5) Complexity of the surface and underlying structures (which are defined in transformational grammar) is an important determinant of thePT for surface and underlying structure ambiguities, respectively.     

To end ambiguous sentences

A study of the time required to complete ambiguous sentences suggested that: even though Ss are unaware of the ambiguity while completing sentences, they take more time to complete ambiguous sentences than unambiguous ones: the degree of difficulty in completing ambiguous sentences is related to the linguistic level at which the ambiguity occurs: sentences containing two ambiguities are more difficult to complete than those containing only one, and when these two ambiguities occur at different linguistic levels, these sentences are harder to complete than when both occur within the same linguistic level: ambiguity may affect the grammaticality and relevance of completions; and may cause stuttering and laughter, even without awareness of the ambiguity. An attempt to fit these results to several theories of the processing of ambiguous sentences led us to the conclusion that ambiguity interferes with our understanding of a single meaning of a sentence, and that the degree of interference varies with the linguistic level at which the ambiguity occurs.     

Not Propositions

Current computational accounts of meaning in the cognitive sciences are based on abstract, amodal symbols (e.g., nodes, links, propositions) that are arbitrarily related to their referents. We argue that such accounts lack convincing empirical support and that they do not provide a satisfactory account for linguistic meaning. One historic set of results supporting the abstract symbol view has come from investigation into comprehension of negated sentences, such as “The buttons are not black.” These sentences are presumed to be understood as two propositions composed of abstract symbols. One proposition corresponds to “the buttons are black,” and it is embedded in another proposition corresponding to “it is not true.” Thus, the propositional account predicts (a) that comprehension of negated sentences should take longer than comprehension of the corresponding positive sentence (because of the time needed to construct the embedding), but (b) that the resulting embedded propositions are informationally equivalent (but of opposite valence) to the simple proposition underlying the positive sentence. Contrary to these predictions, Experiment 1 demonstrates that negated sentences out of context are interpreted as situationally ambiguous, that is, as conveying less specific information than positive sentences. Furthermore, Experiment 2 demonstrates that when negated sentences are used in an appropriate context, readers do not take longer to understand them. Thus, difficulty with negation is demonstrated to be an artifact of presentation out of context. After discussing other serious problems with the use of abstract symbols, we describe the Indexical Hypothesis. This embodied account of meaning does not depend on abstract symbols, and hence it provides a more satisfactory account of meaning.     

Suppose Yalcin is wrong about epistemic modals

In “Epistemic Modals,” Seth Yalcin argues that what explains the deficiency of sentences containing epistemic modals of the form ‘p and it might be that not-p’ is that sentences of this sort are strictly contradictory, and thus are not instances of a Moore-paradox as has been previous suggested. Benjamin Schnieder, however, argues in his Yalcin’s explanation of these sentences’ deficiency turns out to be insufficiently general, as it cannot account for less complex but still defective sentences, such as ‘Suppose it might be raining.’ Consequently, Schnieder proposes his own, expressivist treatment of epistemic modals which he thinks can explain the deficiency of both the original sentence type as well as more complex cases of embedded sentences containing epistemic modals. In this study, I argue that although Schnieder is right to draw our attention to the explanatory failure of Yalcin’s account, we aren’t forced to adopt Schnieder’s expressivist account of epistemic modals. I defend instead a contextualist-friendly alternative which explains the deficiencies of all the relevant sentence types, while avoiding both the defects of Yalcin’s account and the intuitive costs of expressivism.