Patrick Sturt

• University of Edinburgh

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-can...

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a g...

In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an is...

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal...

We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g. "bone" is 92%...

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence’s syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative cla...

This study attempts to reveal the mechanisms behind the online formation of Wh-Filler-Gap Dependencies (WhFGD). Specifically, we aim to uncover the way in which maintenance and retrieval work in WhFGD processing, by paying special attention to the information that is retrieved when the gap is recognized. We use the agreement attraction phenomenon (...

Previous studies have suggested that during the on-line sentence processing, relevant memory representations are directly accessed based on cues at retrieval (McElree et al., 2003). Under this hypothesis, retrieval cues activate any memory representation with matching features, leading to the so-called attraction effect. This predicts that attracti...

Similarity-based interference has played an important role in motivating cue-based models of memory retrieval during language comprehension. One example of interference comes from illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g. ‘the key to the cabinets were rusty’). While such effects indicate interfere...

Although 10–15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions, we still know little about the information that is processed during regressive episodes. Here, we report an eye-movement study that uses what we call the reverse boundary change technique to examine the processing of lexical-semantic information during regressions, and to establish th...

We report three eye-movement experiments and an offline task investigating structural constraints on pronoun resolution in different contexts. This included “coargument” contexts in which a pronoun was the direct object of a verb (“The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had noticed him”), so-called picture noun phrases (“The surgeon remembered that J...

Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In the case of turn-taking in improvised performance they need to be able to predict their partner's turn-end in order to accurately time their own entries. Here we investigate the cues used for accurate turn-end prediction in musical improvisations, focus...

This article reports two ERP studies that exploited the classifier system of Mandarin Chinese to investigate semantic prediction. In Mandarin, in certain contexts, a noun has to be preceded by a classifier, which has to match the noun in semantically-defined features. In both experiments, an N400 effect was elicited in response to a classifier that...

This article reports one eye-tracking and one sentence-completion experiment, examining the antecedent preferences for plural anaphora they and demonstrative these. Our results show that the antecedent-grouping preference depends on type of referring expressions: specifically, the preference for they is to refer to a smaller paired group within the...

To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists’ eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2 they played with an external metron...

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: while the anaphor it brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative this directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking reading experiment confirm...

Previous studies have suggested that sentence processing is mediated by content-addressable direct retrieval processes (McElree, 2000; McElree et al., 2003). However, the memory retrieval processes may differ as a function of the type of dependency. For example, while many studies have reported facilitatory intrusion effects associated with a struc...

In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke's plea to Sophia to photogra...

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ('Interface Hypothesis', Sorace and Filiaci in Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Lang Res 22: 339-368, 2006). The present...

The recent hypothesis that L1 attrition affects the ability to process interface structures but not knowledge representations (Sorace, 2011) is tested by investigating the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on antecedent preferences for Spanish pronominal subjects, using offline judgements and online eye-tracking measures. Participants included a gro...

According to some views of sentence processing, the memory retrieval processes involved in dependency formation may differ as a function of the type of dependency involved. For example, using closely matched materials in a single experiment, Dillon et al. (2013) found evidence for retrieval interference in subject-verb agreement, but not in reflexi...

Recent research has shown much evidence that sentence comprehension can be extremely predictive. However, we currently know little about the limits of predictive processing. In the two eye-tracking experiments, we examined whether predictive information in dependency formation is inevitably given priority over a well-known structural preference in...

The existing literature presents conflicting models of how This and That access different segments of a written discourse, frequently relying on implicit analogies with spoken discourse. On the basis of this literature, we hypothesized that in written discourse, This more readily accesses the adjacent/right frontier of a preceding chunk of text, wh...

Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that the structure of a correctly solved mathematical equation affects how people subsequently complete sentences containing high vs. low relative-clause attachment ambiguities. Here we investigated whether such effects generalise to different structures and tasks, and importantly, whether they also hold in the revers...

Theories differ as to how people recover the meaning of verb-phrase (VP) ellipsis. According to the syntactic account, people reproduce the syntactic structure of the antecedent during the processing of VP ellipsis. This account thus predicts that the ellipsis site contains syntactic information. Using the structural priming paradigm, we found that...

There is considerable controversy on island constraints on wh-dependencies in the psycholinguistics literature. One major point of contention is whether islands result from processing limitations suchas Working Memory capacity or from domain-specific linguistic knowledge. The current study investigates whether islands can be reduced to processing c...

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This restriction is unrealistic in light of experimental results suggesting interactions between syntax and other forms of linguistic information in human sentence p...

Are comprehenders affected by an alternative analysis that they do not adopt (a nonadopted analysis) in case of syntactic ambiguity? If the processor only considers and maintains the preferred analysis at a given time, an alternative analysis is then not considered and will hence not affect processing. In two experiments, we examined the processing...

We report a self-paced reading experiment examining the effect of morpho-syntactic and discourse cues on the resolution of null pronominals in Korean. Unlike many other languages, Korean does not have many morphological cues that could aid reference assignment for null pronominals. Indeed, work in theoretical linguistics has classified Korean as a...

This paper investigates the prediction of syntactic structure during sentence processing, using constructions that temporarily allow a sluicing interpretation in English. Making use of two well-known properties of sluicing and pronoun interpretation—connectivity effects and the local antecedent requirement on reflexives, respectively—we show that (...

Studies in theoretical linguistics argue that subject-verb agreement is more sensitive to grammatical number, while pronoun-antecedent agreement is more sensitive to conceptual number. This claim is robustly supported by speech production research, but few studies have examined this issue in comprehension. We investigated this dissociation between...

In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 - (9 + 1) × 5 or 80 - 9 + 1 × 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as "The touri...

We describe an eye-tracking experiment that tested the effect of syntactic predictability on skipping rates during reading. We found that plural noun phrases were skipped more often than singular noun phrases, in syntactic contexts which induced a high expectation for a plural. We interpret this effect as evidence that the plural noun phrase has be...

This paper introduces a psycholinguistic model of sentence processing which combines a Hidden Markov Model noun phrase chunker with a co-reference classifier. Both models are fully incremental and generative, giving probabilities of lexical elements conditional upon linguistic structure. This allows us to compute the information theoretic measure o...

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three ey...

Investigations into employing statistical approaches with linguistically motivated representations and its impact on Natural Language processing tasks. The last decade has seen computational implementations of large hand-crafted natural language grammars in formal frameworks such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorical Grammar (CCG...

In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as "David blamed Linda because she((bias-congruent))/he((bias-incongruent)) . . . " when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the imp...

A normative study and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of animacy on the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish. The results showed that object relative clauses caused more difficulty than subject relative clauses, but that animacy modulated this preference. The overall pattern was similar to findings in o...

Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure [Frazier, L., Munn, A., & Clifton, C. (2000). Processing coordinate structures. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(4) 343-370]. In the present paper, we argue that this parallel...

Readers immediately slow down when an anaphor (e.g. herself) refers to an antecedent that mismatches in stereotypical gender (e.g. minister). The mismatch-cost has been attributed to a clash between the gender of the pronoun and the gender associated with the stereotypical role noun. However, the nature of such stereotypical gender is still controv...

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the...

Incrementality is a widely held assumption that constrains the language processor to parse the input words from left to right, and to carry out a semantic interpretation of the partial structures (Marslen-Wilson, 1973). The detailed specification of the incremental syntactic process is often addressed by assuming a parsimonious version of increment...

The relationship between heroin-related attentional bias (AB) and a proxy for dependence severity (monthly frequency of heroin use-injecting or inhaling) was measured in individuals attending a heroin harm reduction service. A flicker change blindness paradigm was employed in which change detection latencies were measured to either a heroin-related...

We report an eyetracking study investigating the effects of linguistic focus on eye movements and memory during two readings of a text. Across two presentations of the text, a critical word either changed to a semantically related word or remained unchanged. Focus on the critical word was manipulated using context. Eye movements were monitored duri...

In this paper we report an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate syntactic and phonological parallelism effects in comprehension. Eye-movements were recorded while partici-pants read sentences that contained particle verb constructions. Each experimental item included a coordinated verb phrase (VP), whose two conjuncts either exhibited pa...

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments u...

The psycholinguistic literature provides evidence for syntactic priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat structures. This pa- per describes a method for incorporating priming into an incremental probabilis- tic parser. Three models are compared, which involve priming of rules between sentences, within sentences, and within coordinate structures. These...

Nous utilisons les techniques de suivi du mouvement des yeux pour étudier le degré d'acceptabilité des consommateurs envers différentes extensions de marque. Des phrases étaient présentées aux participants (par exemple: J'ai voulu enregistrer une chanson sur Polaroid mais ça coûte trop cher), et ces phrases ne pouvaient être totalement comprises qu...

Incremental parsing gains its importance in natural language processing and psycholinguistics because of its cognitive plausibility. Modeling the associated cognitive data structures, and their dynamics, can lead to a better understanding of the human parser. In earlier work, we have introduced a recursive neural network (RNN) capable of performing...

We recorded participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing verb-phrase coordination. Results showed evidence of immediate processing disruption when a reflexive pronoun embedded in the conjoined verb phrase mismatched the sentence subject. We argue that this result is incompatible with models of human parsing that employ only bott...

Experimental research in psycholinguis- tics has demonstrated a parallelism effect in coordination: speakers are faster at pro- cessing the second conjunct of a coordi- nate structure if it has the same internal structure as the first conjunct. We show that this phenomenon can be explained by the prevalence of parallel structures in cor- pus data....

Dynamic grammars are relevant for psycholinguistic modelling and speech processing. However, formal treatments of dynamic grammars are rare, and there are few studies that examine the relationship between dynamic and phrase structure grammars. This paper introduces a TAG related dynamic grammar (DVTAG) together with a study of its expressive power....

A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the fu...

This paper examines the use of singular and plural pronominal references to split antecedents such as John and Mary. Current opinion suggests that under the right circumstances, singular reference should be difficult, and plural reference facilitated, but currently only the first of the these predictions has been demonstrated. We report four experi...

We apply eye movement monitoring techniques to examine how acceptable consumers find different brand extensions. Participants were presented with sentences (e.g. I wanted to record a song on Polaroid, but it cost too much.) which could only be fully understood if they made an inference that was based on extending the meaning associated with the bra...

It is a well-known intuition that human sentence understanding works in an incremental fashion, with a seemingly constant update of the inter- pretation through the left-to-right processing of a string. Such intuitions are backed up by ex- perimental evidence dating from at least as far back as Marslen-Wilson (1973), showing that under many circums...

The goal of this paper is to explore some conse-quences of the dichotomy between competence and performance from the point of view of in-crementality. We introduce a TAG–based for-malism that encodes a strong notion of incre-mentality directly into the operations of the formal system. A left-associative operation is used to build a lexicon of exten...

It is a well-known intuition that human sentence understanding works in an incremental fashion, with a seemingly constant update of the interpretation through the left-to-right processing of a string. Such intuitions are backed up by experimental evidence dating from at least as far back as Marslen-Wilson (1973), showing that under many circumstanc...

No abstract available.

One of the central problems in the study of human language processing is ambiguity resolution: how do people resolve the extremely pervasive ambiguity of the language they encounter? One possible answer to this question is suggested by experience-based models, which claim that people typically resolve ambiguities in a way which has been successful...

Within Generative Grammar, binding constraints on co-reference are usually defined in syntactic terms. However, some researchers have pointed out examples in which syntactically defined binding constraints do not seem to apply, proposing instead that a complete account of linguistic co-reference needs to consider notions of discourse structure. The...

We report two experiments which examined the role of binding theory in on-line sentence processing. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they read short texts which included anaphoric references with reflexive anaphors (himself or herself). In each of the experiments, two characters were introduced into the discourse before the anaphor,...

This paper explores the convergence between cognitive modeling and engineering solutions to the parsing problem in NLP. Natural language presents many sources of ambiguity, and several theories of human parsing claim that ambiguity is resolved by using past (linguistic) experience. In this paper we analyze and refine a connectionist paradigm (Recur...

The study of processes underlying the interpretation of language often produces evidence that they are complete and occur incrementally. However, computational linguistics has shown that interpretations are often effective even if they are underspecified. We present evidence that similar underspecified representations are used by humans during comp...

This paper describes the author's implementation of a parser aimed at reproducing, in a computationally explicit system, the constraints of a particular psy- cholinguistic model (Gottell in press). In Gorrell's model, "unconscious" garden paths may be processed via the addition of structural relations to a monotone in- creasing set at the point of...

Although a great deal of research has investigated the factors affecting initial syntactic processing, little is known about the factors that affect processing during reanalysis. To address this question, we report a self-paced reading and an eye-tracking experiment which tested sentences in which there is initially more than one way for reanalysis...

This paper explores the convergence between cognitive modeling and engineering solutions to the parsing problem in NLP. Natural language presents many sources of ambiguity, and several theories of human parsing claim that ambiguity is resolved by using past (linguistic) experience. In this paper we analyze and refine a connectionist paradigm (Recur...

Lexical effects on language processing are currently a major focus of attention in studies of sentence comprehension. This thematic collection provides a uniquely multi-faceted and integrated viewpoint on key aspects of lexicalist theories, drawing from the fields of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The foc...

During language comprehension, people sometimes have to revise their grammatical analysis of a sentence. Experimental evidence demonstrates that such reanalysis often causes processing difficulty. We might therefore predict that reanalysis would be disfavored, with the processor preferring not to reanalyze when it had a choice. Three experiments on...

We first consider the nature of syntactic reanalysis, paying particular attention to questions about whether and how it differs from the construction of an initial analysis, such as whether it is encapsulated or whether alternatives are considered in parallel or not. We then outline different strategies that the processor may use in reanalysis, and...

Many theories of parsing predict that the difficulty of syntactic reanalysis depends on the type of structural change involved. However, most existing experimental data show that reanalysis difficulty is affected by nonstructural factors like plausibility and verb bias, whereas claims about structural change are typically based on intuition alone....

A common assumption in psycholinguistic theory is that reanalysis is constrained by a preference to preserve certain aspects of the representation built in response to previous input. In this chapter, we discuss this notion of representation-preservation in the wider context of models of reanalysis as a whole, and point out that in order to define...

This thesis combines theoretical, computational and experimental techniques in the study of reanalysis in human sentence comprehension. We begin by surveying the main claims of existing theories of reanalysis, and identify representation preservation as a key concept. We show that the models which most obviously feature representation preservation...

Following from the initial work of description theory (Marcus, Hindle, & Fleck, 1983), monotonic models of sentence processing seek to isolate representation types which can tolerate certain classes of structural revision through totally nondestructive update. In this paper we argue that, due to the concentration of existing monotonic models on con...

This paper describes a new addition to the family of parsing models based on the principles of Description-Theory (Marcus, Hindle & Fleck, 1983). We demonstrate how the definition of two simple parsing operations, simple attachment and tree lowering, which are related to the grammatical composition operations of substitution and adjunction in the T...

Experimental evidence demonstrates that understanding begins before the end of a sentence. This presumably means that some proposition based on what is heard is integrated with contextually relevant propositions drawn from general knowledge. However, formal treatments of the semantics of natural language do not typically give fragments a propositio...

We present a system for the investigation of computational properties of categorial grammar parsing based on a labelled analytic tableaux theorem prover. This proof method allows us to take a modular approach, in which the basic grammar can be kept constant, while a range of categorial calculi can be captured by assigning different properties to th...

This paper describes the author's imple- mentation of a parser aimed at repro- ducing, in a computationally explicit sys- tem, the constraints of a particular psy- cholinguistic model (Gorrell in press). In Gorrell's model, "unconscious" garden paths may be processed via the addition of structural relations to a monotone in- creasing set at the poi...

this paper, we propose a solution to a problem which has to be addressed by any strongly incremental parser, namely the problem of infinite local ambiguity.

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant for investigating the architecture of the human sentence processor (e.g. Jurafsky 1996) but are often limited to explaining syntactic processing. Here, we introduce a novel sentence processing model that consists of a parser augmented with a co-reference resolution system, whi...

Sentence processing research on head-final languages has shown evidence that (a) syntactic dependencies among pre-verbal elements can be computed (e.g., Aoshima et al, 2004), and (b) complex multi-clausal structure can be predicted, before a verb is reached in the input. For example, Yoshida et al (2004) showed that a classifier mismatch early in t...