Priming word order by thematic roles: No evidence for an additional involvement of phrase structure

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases.     

Argument Status and PP-Attachment

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the same manner, following a general bias to attach prepositional phrases to the verb phrase whenever possible [Clifton, Speer, & Abney (1991) Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 251–271]. The current study supports the hypothesis for differential processing, even during the initial stages of syntactic analysis. In an eye movement experiment, readers spent less first-pass time on argument prepositional phrases (PPs) than adjunct PPs. The results support a view in which a noun’s or verb’s argument structure can facilitate the analysis of its arguments.This research was supported by NSF grants SBR-9729056 and SBR-9720473 to the first author. We gratefully thank Gerry Altmann, Rick Lewis, Brian McElree, Don Mitchell, Neal Pearlmutter, Shari Speer, and Suzanne Stevenson for useful discussions and helpful comments. We would also like to acknowledge the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, where the eye movement data were collected and an initial draft of the paper was written.     

A novel argument for the Universality of Parsing principles

Previous work on Relative Clause attachment has overlooked a crucial grammatical distinction across both the languages and structures tested: the selective availability of Pseudo Relatives. We reconsider the literature in light of this observation and argue that, all else being equal, local attachment is found with genuine Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment emerges when their surface identical imposters, Pseudo Relatives, are available. Hence, apparent cross-linguistic variation in parsing preferences is reducible to grammatical factors. The results from two novel experiments in Italian are presented in support of these conclusions.     

Composition in distributional models of semantics

Vector-based models of word meaning have become increasingly popular in cognitive science. The appeal of these models lies in their ability to represent meaning simply by using distributional information under the assumption that words occurring within similar contexts are semantically similar. Despite their widespread use, vector-based models are typically directed at representing words in isolation, and methods for constructing representations for phrases or sentences have received little attention in the literature. This is in marked contrast to experimental evidence (e.g., in sentential priming) suggesting that semantic similarity is more complex than simply a relation between isolated words. This article proposes a framework for representing the meaning of word combinations in vector space. Central to our approach is vector composition, which we operationalize in terms of additive and multiplicative functions. Under this framework, we introduce a wide range of composition models that we evaluate empirically on a phrase similarity task.     

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.     

On the early left-anterior negativity (ELAN) in syntax studies

Within the framework of Friederici’s (2002) neurocognitive model of sentence processing, the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) in event-related potentials (ERPs) has been claimed to be a brain marker of syntactic first-pass parsing. As ELAN components seem to be exclusively elicited by word category violations (phrase structure violations), they have been taken as strong empirical support for syntax-first models of sentence processing and have gained considerable impact on psycholinguistic theory in a variety of domains. The present article reviews relevant ELAN studies and raises a number of serious issues concerning the reliability and validity of the findings. We also discuss how baseline problems and contextual factors can contribute to early ERP effects in studies examining word category violations. We conclude that - despite the apparent wealth of ELAN data - the functional significance of these findings remains largely unclear. The present paper does not claim to have falsified the existence of ELANs or syntax-related early frontal negativities. However, by separating facts from myths, the paper attempts to make a constructive contribution to how future ERP research in the area of syntax processing may better advance our understanding of online sentence comprehension.     

Improving Oral Reading Fluency Through Response Opportunities: A Comparison of Phrase Drill Error Correction with Repeated Readings

The purpose of this study was to compare two oral reading fluency treatments (repeated readings and phrase drill error correction) which differ in the way they prompt student responding. Repeated readings (RR) and phrase drill (PD) error correction were alternated with a baseline and a reward condition within an alternating treatments design with an 8-year old boy referred for reading difficulties. Results indicate that RR and PD improved the participant’s reading fluency equally well relative to both baseline and reward conditions. Results are discussed in terms of the types and relevance of response opportunities afforded by each intervention.     

The kindergarten path effect revisited: children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities

Research with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are resolved efficiently, exploiting multiple cues--including referential context--to select the intended meaning. Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead on statistical properties intrinsic to the language such as verb biases. The possibility that children's insensitivity to referential context may be an artifact of the experimental design used in previous work was explored with 60 4- to 11-year-olds. An act-out task was designed to discourage children from making incorrect pragmatic inferences and to prevent premature and ballistic responses by enforcing delayed actions. Performance on this task was compared directly with the standard act-out task used in previous studies. The results suggest that young children (5 years) do not use contextual information, even under conditions designed to maximize their use of such cues, but that adult-like processing is evident by approximately 8 years of age. These results support and extend previous findings by Trueswell and colleagues (Cognition (1999), Vol. 73, pp. 89-134) and are consistent with a constraint-based learning account of children's linguistic development.