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The Processing of Which Interrogative Sentences: A Behavioral and ERP Study
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This paper presents two experiments on the processing of informative definite descriptions in plausible vs. implausible contexts. Experiment 1 is a self-paced reading task (with French native speakers, n = 69), with sentences containing a definite vs. indefinite NP, each preceded by plausible or implausible contexts. Our study replicated Singh and colleagues’ findings, namely that definite descriptions are significantly costlier when they occur in implausible contexts. The translation of the original stimuli from English to French did not affect the results, suggesting that the phenomenon applies cross-linguistically. Experiment 2 consists in an eye-tracking task, designed to measure the participants’ (n = 44) gaze patterns on complete sentences with the same four conditions (definite vs. indefinite NP; implausible vs. implausible contexts). A mixed effect model analysis revealed that (a) the total gaze duration on target segments and (b) the processing of the complete sentence were significantly longer in implausible conditions. These results show that implausible contexts predict a marked increase in the offline processing costs of definite descriptions. However, no significant difference was found for online processing measures (i.e., first fixation duration, first-pass reading time and regression path time measures) across all experimental conditions. These results suggest that it is only once the sentence is fully processed that implausible contexts increase processing costs. Furthermore, these results raise methodological issues related to the study of the online processing of definite descriptions, to the extent that self-paced reading and eye-tracking methods in the present study lead to incompatible results. With respect to the eye-tracking results, we suggest that the contrast between online and offline processing is likely to reflect the fact that participants first adopt a stance of trust to understand utterances before filtering the information through their epistemic vigilance module.
Event-related potential components are sensitive to the processes underlying how questions are understood. We use so-called “covert” wh-questions in Mandarin to probe how such components generalize across different kinds of constructions. This study shows that covert Mandarin wh-questions do not elicit anterior negativities associated with memory maintenance, even when such a dependency is unambiguously cued. N = 37 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese read Chinese questions and declarative sentences word-by-word during EEG recording. In contrast to prior studies, no sustained anterior negativity (SAN) was observed between the cue word, such as the question-embedding verb “wonder,” and the in-situ wh-filler. SANs have been linked with working memory maintenance, suggesting that grammatical features may not impose the same maintenance demands as the content words used in prior work.
We investigated the relative independence of two key processes in language comprehension, as reflected in the P600 ERP component. Numerous studies have linked the P600 to sentence- or message-level reanalysis; however, much research has shown that skilled, cue-based memory retrieval operations are also important to successful language processing. Our goal was to identify whether these cue-based retrieval operations are part of the reanalysis processes indexed by the P600. To this end, participants read sentences that were either grammatical or ungrammatical via subject-verb agreement violations, and in which there was either no possibility for retrieval interference or there was an attractor noun interfering with the computation of subject-verb agreement (e.g., The slogan on the political poster(s) was/were…). A stimulus onset asynchrony manipulation (fast, medium, or slow presentation rate) was designed to modulate participants’ ability to engage in reanalysis processes. Results showed a reliable attraction interference effect, indexed by reduced behavioral sensitivity to ungrammaticalities and P600 amplitudes when there was an opportunity for retrieval interference, as well as an effect of presentation rate, with reduced behavioral sensitivity and smaller P600 effects at faster presentation rates. Importantly, there was no interaction between the two, suggesting that retrieval interference and sentence-level reanalysis processes indexed by the P600 can be neurocognitively distinct processes.
Prior studies on online sentence processing have shown that the parser can resolve non-local dependencies rapidly and accurately. This study investigates the interaction between the processing of two such non-local dependencies: wh-filler-gap dependencies (WhFGD) and reflexive-antecedent dependencies. We show that reflexive-antecedent dependency resolution is sensitive to the presence of a WhFGD, and argue that the filler-gap dependency established by WhFGD resolution is selected online as the antecedent of a reflexive dependency. We investigate the processing of constructions like (1), where two NPs might be possible antecedents for the reflexive, namely which cowgirl and Mary. Even though Mary is linearly closer to the reflexive, the only grammatically licit antecedent for the reflexive is the more distant wh-NP, which cowgirl.
(1). Which cowgirl did Mary expect to have injured herself due to negligence?
Four eye-tracking text-reading experiments were conducted on examples like (1), differing in whether the embedded clause was non-finite (1 and 3) or finite (2 and 4), and in whether the tail of the wh-dependency intervened between the reflexive and its closest overt antecedent (1 and 2) or the wh-dependency was associated with a position earlier in the sentence (3 and 4). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate the parser accesses the result of WhFGD formation during reflexive antecedent search. The resolution of a wh-dependency alters the representation that reflexive antecedent search operates over, allowing the grammatical but linearly distant antecedent to be accessed rapidly. In the absence of a long-distance WhFGD (Experiments 3 and 4), wh-NPs were not found to impact reading times of the reflexive, indicating that the parser's ability to select distant wh-NPs as reflexive antecedents crucially involves syntactic structure.
Self-paced reading and eye-tracking can be used to measure microlevel student engagement during science instruction. These methods imply a definition of engagement as the quantity and quality of mental resources directed at an object and the emotions and behaviors entailed. This definition is theoretically supported by models of reading comprehension and visualization comprehension. The use of eye-movement data is based on a number of assumptions, including the assumption that people look longer at words and images because they are thinking about those objects more. Self-paced reading and eye-tracking have strengths such as precision and detail as well as limitations including difficulty of interpretation. Carefully controlled research designs and triangulation of multiple methods are suggested as possible ways to address the limitations and take advantage of the strengths. Two examples drawn from the refutational text literature are described.
Since the publication of Clahsen and Felser’s (2006) keynote article on grammatical processing in language learners, the online study of sentence comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners has quickly grown into a vibrant and prolific subfield of SLA. As online methods begin to establish a foothold in SLA research, it is important that researchers in our field design sentence-comprehension experiments that adhere to the fundamental principles of research design typical of sentence processing studies published in related subfields of the language sciences. In this article, we discuss and review widely accepted principles of research design for sentence processing studies that are not always followed in L2 sentence processing research. Particular emphasis is placed on the design of experimental items and distractors, the choice and design of the poststimulus distractor task, procedures for presenting stimuli to participants, and methods for trimming and analyzing online data, among others.
This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two Basic factors in the Minimalist program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines similar objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. This book examines the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features — a subset of formal features. The book combines grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn form a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns, and complementizers.
To communicate efficiently, speakers typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and adapt their utterances to the listener‘s discourse representation. Information structure describes how linguistic information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. The present study investigates the nature and time course of context integration (i.e., aboutness topic vs. neutral context) on the comprehension of German declarative sentences with either subject-before-object (SO) or object-before-subject (OS) word order using offline comprehensibility judgments and online event-related potentials (ERPs). Comprehensibility judgments revealed that the topic context selectively facilitated comprehension of stories containing OS (i.e., non-canonical) sentences. In the ERPs, the topic context effect was reflected in a less pronounced late positivity at the sentence-initial object. In line with the Syntax-Discourse Model, we argue that these context-induced effects are attributable to reduced processing costs for updating the current discourse model. The results support recent approaches of neurocognitive models of discourse processing.
Research on language comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs) reported distinct ERP components reliably related to the processing of semantic (N400) and syntactic information (P600). Recent ERP studies have challenged this well-defined distinction by showing P600 effects for semantic and pragmatic anomalies. So far, it is still unresolved whether the P600 reflects specific or rather common processes. The present study addresses this question by investigating ERPs in response to a syntactic and pragmatic (irony) manipulation, as well as a combined syntactic and pragmatic manipulation. For the syntactic condition, a morphosyntactic violation was applied, whereas for the pragmatic condition, such as "That is rich", either an ironic or literal interpretation was achieved, depending on the prior context. The ERPs at the critical word showed a LAN-P600 pattern for syntactically incorrect sentences relative to correct ones. For ironic compared to literal sentences, ERPs showed a P200 effect followed by a P600 component. In comparison of the syntax-related P600 to the irony-related P600, distributional differences were found. Moreover, for the P600 time window (i.e., 500-900 ms), different changes in theta power between the syntax and pragmatics effects were found, suggesting that different patterns of neural activity contributed to each respective effect. Thus, both late positivities seem to be differently sensitive to these two types of linguistic information, and might reflect distinct neurocognitive processes, such as reanalysis of the sentence structure versus pragmatic reanalysis.
We investigate the production of subject and object who- and which-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.
Theoretical considerations and diverse empirical data from clinical, psycholinguistic, and developmental studies suggest that language comprehension processes are decomposable into separate subsystems, including distinct systems for semantic and grammatical processing. Here we report that event-related potentials (ERPs) to syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous sentences produced a pattern of brain activity that is distinct in timing and distribution from the patterns elicited by syntactically deviant sentences, and further, that different types of syntactic deviance produced distinct ERP patterns. Forty right-handed young adults read sentences presented at 2 words/sec while ERPs were recorded from over several positions between and within the hemispheres. Half of the sentences were semantically and grammatically acceptable and were controls for the remainder, which contained sentence medial words that violated (1) semantic expectations, (2) phrase structure rules, or (3) WH-movement constraints on Specificity and (4) Subjacency. As in prior research, the semantic anomalies produced a negative potential, N400, that was bilaterally distributed and was largest over posterior regions. The phrase structure violations enhanced the N125 response over anterior regions of the left hemisphere, and elicited a negative response (300-500 msec) over temporal and parietal regions of the left hemisphere. Violations of Specificity constraints produced a slow negative potential, evident by 125 msec, that was also largest over anterior regions of the left hemisphere. Violations of Subjacency constraints elicited a broadly and symmetrically distributed positivity that onset around 200 msec. The distinct timing and distribution of these effects provide biological support for theories that distinguish between these types of grammatical rules and constraints and more generally for the proposal that semantic and grammatical processes are distinct subsystems within the language faculty.
The objective of the present study was to delineate brain-electrical correlates of semantic and syntactic integration processes during language comprehension. Twenty-eight subjects were engaged in a lexical decision task. The target item (a legal word or a pseudo word) was always preceded by a prime consisting of a sentence fragment that provided a particular context. With respect to the prime a word target could be either a correct completion, a violation of a semantic selection restriction, or a violation of a syntactic subcategorization rule. An N400-like wave was elicited by both types of deviations. Syntactic anomalies evoked a negative shift predominantly over the anterior scalp with a preponderance over the left hemisphere, while semantic anomalies were accompanied by a much more widespread negativity with the maximum over posterior temporal areas. The amplitude of the semantic vie lation effect was found to be related to the strength of the priming constraints. The topographic difference is consistent with the idea that syntactic and semantic aspects of comprehension are handled by different neural subsystems.
review . . . methods and data in the domain of the electrophysiology of psycholinguistics / aimed at the psycholinguist who wants to better understand experimental reports in which ERPs [event-related brain potentials] are the primary dependent measure and/or [those] who may wish to use ERPs to address certain psycholinguistic questions / concerned with the representation and timing of language processes at both psychological and physiological levels that has yielded the data that were reviewed
general description of the electroencephalogram and event-related brain potentials / why use ERPs to study language / overview of language-sensitive components / biological factors / psycholinguistic factors (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance wh-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what might be the specific mechanisms that are shared between successful processing of well-formed sentences and the detection and repair of syntactic anomalies. The current study presents a comparison of the ERP responses elicited by syntactic violations, garden path sentences, and long-distance wh-dependencies, using maximally similar We would like to thank Virginie van Wassenhove, Anthony Boemio, and Anna Salajegheh for their help with EEG recordings, Anna Salajegheh and Beth Rabbin for their assistance in the preparation of materials, and Brian Dillon for his help with data analyses.
Young children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A’-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of a proper extension of Relativized Minimality, the principle of syntactic theory which expresses locality effects linked to intervention, and whose psycholinguistic relevance has been highlighted in Grillo’s work on agrammatism. Six experiments have been conducted with 22 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;7–5;0 to substantiate our claims empirically. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of headed subject and object relatives with and without a resumptive pronoun, in sentences with lexically restricted (D NP) subjects. Subject relatives were comprehended well, but the performance on object relatives was at chance. The addition of resumptive pronouns did not improve comprehension. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the lexical restriction of the moved element and the intervening subject, using free relatives and impersonal pro subjects, respectively. When the moved constituent and the intervening subject were structurally dissimilar in terms of lexical-NP restriction, the performance significantly improved. Experiment 5 showed a similar comprehension pattern in another type of A’ movement: Wh-questions. The comprehension of who and which subject and object questions was difficult only when both the crossing element and the intervener included a lexical NP restriction. Finally, a similar pattern emerged in production: in an elicited production study, children showed a tendency to avoid producing structures in which both the moved element and the intervener are lexically restricted. We conclude suggesting a line of analysis of the difference between children and adults in dealing with object A’-dependencies.
We evaluated the distinctiveness, independence, and relative time courses of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by syntactically and semantically anomalous words. ERPs were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences, some of which contained a selectional restriction violation (semantically anomalous), a verb tense violation (syntactically anomalous), or a doubly anomalous word that violated both selectional restriction and verb tense constraints. Semantic anomalies elicited a monophasic increase in N400 amplitude, whereas syntactic anomalies elicited a late positive shift with an onset around 500 msec and a duration of several hundred msec. Doubly anomalous words elicited both an increase in N400 amplitude and a late positive wave, and these effects summated in an approximately (but not perfectly) linear manner. These results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses that syntactic and semantic processes are separable and independent.
In Italian, relative clauses are syntactically ambiguous between a subject and an object reading when the subject and the object have the same number. In the absence of disambiguating cues, the parser analyzes the sentence as a subject relative clause, as subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. However, the object reading can be triggered by morpho-syntactic and syntactic cues, such as agreement and word order. In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigate the effectiveness of these cues in triggering an object reanalysis by comparing cues that appear at an early processing stage (inside the relative clause) and cues that appear at a late processing stage (after the relative clause). Results show that reanalysis is attained more effortlessly for early cues, while late cues appears to trigger little or no reanalysis, suggesting that the longer the processor has been committed to the incorrect analysis, the harder is to undo the initial commitment (digging-in effect; Tabor & Hutchins, 2004; see also Ferreira & Henderson, 1991). From these results, we argue that one critical factor that affects ease of parsing is the processing stage at which a cue is made available in the input. We conclude with a discussion on the self-organized sentence processing model (SOSP), which provides a framework to capture these effects.
In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, [Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn’t like/likes] learning English. In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at the postcritical region in both concession and causality. When a second postcritical region was added (Experiment 2), implausibility induced a sustained effect in causality but became temporarily acceptable in concession. In an eye-tracking study, plausibility induced a larger effect in concession on the second-pass and the total reading time of the precritical regions than in causality. The results suggest that verifying sentence plausibility in a negated cause–effect relation (i.e., concession) can be as fast as in a direct cause–effect relation (i.e., causality), as negation is expected in processing concession. At a later stage, different strategies are adopted in resolving the implausibility of the two relations. We suggest that a perspective shift is involved in resolving the implausibility in concession, which induces greater cost compared with causality.
Many neurocognitive accounts of language processing presume that neural responses detected in grand mean analyses of cortical electrophysiological activity reflect the normative brain response in the population under investigation. However, emerging work now shows that individuals' brain responses can vary systematically in both the size and type of effect elicited. The present research therefore examined individual differences in neural activity elicited by grammatical agreement anomalies during language comprehension in a large cohort of highly literate, monolingual English speakers (N = 114), a population generally assumed to be relatively homogenous in terms of linguistic knowledge and processing. Results showed systematic variability in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by subject-verb agreement anomalies, with brain responses varying on a continuum between N400 and P600 dominant responses. Similar variation was found both when agreement was realized via inflectional morphology or via lexical alternations. Individuals' brain response type correlated strongly across these two conditions. Similar variation was also found for ERPs elicited during rapid serial visual presentation and when self-paced ERPs were recorded. Multilevel latent variable regression showed that variation in brain response amplitude and type was not related to individual differences in language experience or verbal working memory capacity, despite high statistical power. These findings indicate that descriptions of processing dynamics predicated solely on grand mean analyses of central tendency can fail to provide an accurate, generalizable account of how processing unfolds in many or most individual members of the population studied. Furthermore, these findings show that systematic individual variation in engagement of neural system supporting grammatical processing is found even in language users at the highest end of the proficiency spectrum and in grammatically simple sentences. This study therefore has implications for studies of language processing in atypical populations.
This paper is a contribution to a long-standing discussion related to the domain of aspectual interpretation. More precisely, it focuses on the impact of the degree of specificity and morphological complexity on the time course of processing of perfective (prefixed perfective and semelfactive perfective) and imperfective (simple imperfective and iterative imperfective) verbs in Polish. In two experiments, eye-tracking during reading and self-paced reading, we tested a hypothesis based on Frisson & Pickering (1999), Pickering & Frisson (2001), and Frisson (2009) that the interpretation of semantically underspecified verbs should be delayed to the end of a sentence. As predicted, in both of the reported experiments significantly longer reading measures were observed for aspectually underspecified simple imperfective verbs as compared to aspectually more specific perfective verbs in the sentence-final region. Our second major prediction was that morphological complexity of aspectual forms should cause computational cost directly on the verbal region. As predicted, significantly longer reading times were observed on morphologically complex (prefixed) perfective verbs and (suffixed) semelfactive perfective verbs as compared to their morphologically simple imperfective counterparts in the eye-tracking experiment. This effect was not confirmed in the self-paced reading experiment. This difference between the results in the two reported experiments is attributed to the differences between the methods used.
This study investigates the neurophysiological correlates of presupposition processing in conditions of satisfaction and accommodation, comparing two types of triggers: definite descriptions and change-of-state verbs. Results showed that, for both types, the accommodation of presuppositions is associated with a biphasic N400-P600 pattern at the processing point. With definite descriptions, we observed a more clear involvement of theN400, while for change-of-state verbs the costs of accommodation were associated with amore pronounced P600. Moreover, when conveyed by change of state predicates, pre-suppositions seem to elicit also a P200 visible already at the trigger verb. The data nicely fit into the Linking-Updating model and support two main conclusions. First, presupposition accommodation is a sequential process unfolding through a biphasic ERP pattern presumably related to search for antecedent and discourse update. Second, the kind of pre-supposition trigger seems to affect the cognitive cost of presupposition accommodation at different processing times, with definite description capitalizing more on the earlier search for antecedent and change-of-state verbs capitalizing more on the later updating of the discourse mental model with the presupposed information. Overall, our findings suggest that the brain understands information taken for granted by going through a process whose time course involves several phases, differently modulated based on specific linguistic expressions.
The ability to efficiently process presuppositions, which contain information that the speaker believes to be in the background to the conversation, is essential for effective communication. To get a deeper understanding of the nature and the time-course of temporal presupposition processing, we examined event-related potential evoked by the word again in two types of sentence contexts. The word again was presented in contexts that supported a presupposition (e.g. Jake had tipped a maid at the hotel once before. Today he tipped a maid at the hotel again … ) or violated it (e.g. Jake had never tipped a maid at the hotel before. Today he tipped a maid at the hotel again … ). The presupposition violation was associated with increased amplitudes of the P3b/P600 but not the N400 component. We argue for the centrality of the P3b/P600 component for presupposition processing. These findings demonstrate rapid integration of lexical presuppositions with contextual knowledge.
Der folgende Beitrag beschreibt eine Phase des Passauer Projekts1 “GB-Parsing”, in der es darum geht, Aktionen für unser Parsingprogramm PAULA
2 zu spezifizieren, die strukturell mehrdeutige Fragesätze mit Subjekt-Objekt-Ambiguitäten zu verarbeiten imstande sind. Ziel des Projektes zur syntaktischen Analyse des Deutschen auf der Grundlage der Rektions- und Bindungstheorie ist die Modellierung und Simulation der beim menschlichen Sprachverstehen ablaufenden kognitiven Prozesse, d.h. das Parsingprogramm soll jene Effekte aufweisen, die auch bei der menschlichen Sprachverarbeitung zu beobachten sind. Steht man vor dieser Aufgabe, so findet man sich konfrontiert mit einer großen Anzahl psycholinguistischer Publikationen, die jedoch fast ausschließlich auf Untersuchungen des Englischen basieren. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der vorliegenden Literatur sowie der Verlauf und die Ergebnisse erster eigener psycholinguistischer Untersuchungen des Deutschen sind Gegenstand der folgenden Ausführungen. Diesen Ausführungen — wie der gesamten Arbeit im Passauer Projekt — übergeordnet ist die Frage nach dem Zusammenhang zwischen Grammatik und Verarbeitungsmechanismus.
I: Verb Classes.- I: Intransitive Verbs and Auxiliaries.- 1.0. Introduction.- 1.1. Free Inversion.- 1.2. The Distribution of ne.- 1.3. Ergative Verbs.- 1.4. On the Syntax of ne.- 1.5. Reflexive, Ergative and Inherent-reflexive si.- 1.6. Impersonal si.- 1.6.0. Introduction.- 1.6.1. SI as a Subject Argument.- 1.6.2. Object Preposing.- 1.7. Auxiliary Assignment.- 1.8. Linear Order.- 1.9. Conclusion.- Notes.- 2: The Syntax of Inversion.- 2.0. Introduction.- 2.1. Null Subjects and Cliticization.- 2.2. Null Subjects and Free Inversion.- 2.3. Inversion Relations and Emphatic Pronouns.- 2.4. Residual Questions.- 2.5. Piedmontese ye.- 2.5.0. Introduction.- 2.5.1. Inflectional Clitics.- 2.5.2. Inversion.- 2.5.3. Italian ci.- 2.5.4. Verb Agreement.- 2.5.5. Conclusion.- 2.6. French il.- 2.6.1. Subject Pronouns.- 2.6.2. Il-inversion and Auxiliary Assignment.- 2.6.3. Se moyen.- 2.7. English there.- 2.7.0. Introduction.- 2.7.1. 'Be' as a Raising Verb.- 2.7.2. Inversion with 'be'.- 2.7.3. Presentational there.- 2.8. Conclusion.- Notes.- 3: on Reconstruction and Other Matters.- 3.0. Introduction.- 3.1. Subject ?-role and Case.- 3.1.1. Minus Accusative.- 3.1.2. Double Objects.- 3.1.3. By-phrases.- 3.2. Past Participial Clauses.- 3.2.0. Introduction.- 3.2.1. English.- 3.2.2. Impersonal Passives.- 3.2.3. Italian sc Relatives.- 3.3. Reconstruction.- 3.3.0. Introduction.- 3.3.1. Each Interpretation.- 3.3.2. Quantifier Scope.- 3.3.3. Reconstruction and the Projection Principle.- Notes.- II: Complex Predicates.- 4: Causative Constructions.- 4.0. Introduction.- 4.1. Faire-Infinitive.- 4.1.0. Introduction.- 4.1.1. Syntactic Derivation.- 4.1.2. Sentential Complement.- 4.1.3. Exceptional Case Marking.- 4.1.4. Cliticization.- 4.1.5. VP-movement.- 4.2. Faire-par.- 4.2.0. Introduction.- 4.2.1. Base-generation.- 4.2.2. Thematic Subject.- 4.2.3. On the 'Transformational' Approach.- 4.3. Similarities between FI and FP.- 4.4. Syntactic Subject.- 4.5. Ergative Complements of fare.- 4.5.0. Introduction.- 4.5.1. Dative and Reflexive Objects.- 4.5.2. Dativized Subjects.- 4.5.3. Further Remarks and Conclusions.- 4.6. FI versus Reconstruction.- 4.7. On Perception Verbs.- 4.8. Conclusion.- Notes.- 5: Restructuring Constructions.- 5.0. Introduction.- 5.1. Syntactic Derivation.- 5.2. Restructuring with andare, venire.- 5.3. Embedded Subject.- 5.4. Similarities between Restructuring and Causative Constructions.- 5.5 Auxiliaries and Past Participle Agreement.- 5.6. Subject Substitution.- 5.7. Auxiliaries in Some Special Cases.- 5.8. More on the Differences between Causative and Restructuring Constructions.- 5.8.0. Introduction.- 5.8.1. Subject Substitution versus VP-Complements.- 5.8.2. Matrix Passives.- 5.8.3. Prepositional Infinitives.- 5.8.4. Summary.- 5.9. Conclusion.- Notes.- 6: Reflexives.- 6.0. Introduction.- 6.1. Reflexives and Auxiliary Assignment.- 6.2. Reflexives in Complex Predicates.- 6.3. Reflexives as Lexical Affixes.- 6.3.0. Introduction.- 6.3.1. Ergative and Inherent-reflexive si.- 6.3.2. Inversion and sc Relatives.- 6.3.3. Reflexives under faire.- 6.4. Conclusion 427 Notes.- Closing Remarks.- Index of Names.- Analytical Index.
The P600 component in Event Related Potential research has been hypothesised to be associated with syntactic reanalysis processes. We, however, propose that the P600 is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. First we discuss this integration hypothesis in terms of a sentence processing model proposed elsewhere. Next, in Experiment 1, we show that the P600 is elicited in grammatical, non-garden path sentences in which integration is more difficult (i.e., ''who'' questions) relative to a control sentence (''whether'' questions). This effect is replicated in Experiment 2. Furthermore, we directly compare the effect of difficult integration in grammatical sentences to the effect of agreement violations. The results suggest that the positivity elicited in ''who'' questions and the P600-effect elicited by agreement violations have partly overlapping neural generators. This supports the hypothesis that similar cognitive processes, i.e., integration, are involved in both first pass analysis of ''who'' questions and dealing with ungrammaticalities (reanalysis).
This article examines the acquisition of subject and object wh-questions by English-speaking children. The acquisitional predictions of several recent linguistic descriptions of subject and object questions are described and tested experimentally using the CHILDES transcripts of 12 English-speaking children. Analyses of these transcripts revealed that, contrary to previous reports and the prediction made by the Wh-subject In Situ and Small Clause Hypotheses, object, questions were acquired, at the same age or earlier than subject questions. Additional analyses revealed that this acquisitional ordering was not merely a reflection of the frequency with which children or adults asked subject and object questions, nor did it seem to be due to the greater noticeability of object gaps than subject gaps. One possibility that is consistent with all the results is that the acquisitional ordering reflects the way in which subject and object traces are governed.
Four experiments studied the comprehension of sentences with relations between empty positions and phrases displaced from these positions (“gaps” and fillers). Evidence from self-paced reading and end-of-sentence acceptability judgement tasks confirms previous research indicating that the parser prefers to assign an identified filler as the argument of a verb immediately, rather than waiting to check the input for a lexical item of the expected category. We propose that the parser follows an “active filler strategy” which ranks the option of a gap above other options in the domain of an identified filler. The preference for gap over lexical item was evidenced even when a clause boundary separated filler and gap, but the need in this case to carry a filler across a clause boundary created substantial processing difficulty. We propose that, in processing a “long” movement (across more than one clause), the parser must assign the filler to a special “non-argument” position in a successive cylic fashion, consistent with the successive cyclic analysis of long-distance dependencies offered by some grammars.
Two experiments investigate how people assign a grammatical meaning to WH-phrases in embedded questions. The first experiment replicates Crain and Fodor's (1985) finding that object NPs take longer to read in a WH-question than in a corresponding declarative sentence, suggesting that people expect not to find an object, presumably because they have associated the object semantic role with the WH-phrase. Experiment 1 also shows that there is no such difficulty at the subject NP, suggesting that the subject semantic role is not associated with the WH-phrase in the same way as the object role. Experiment 2 investigated whether people assign a semantic role to the WH-phrase which cannot be grammatically acceptable; the evidence suggests that people are not prone to make such mistakes.
The goal of this chapter is to provide a new, refined formal characterization of the locality principle known as Relativized Minimality. At the same time, we will try to show how the study of locality interacts with the “cartographic approach,” the attempt to draw maps of syntactic configuratons as precise and detailed as possible. A fundamental discovery of modern formal linguistics is that, if the length and depth of syntactic representations is unbounded, core structural relations are local. According to the Relativized Minimality approach, a local relation is one that must be satisfied in the smallest environment in which it can be satisfied. One traditional implementation of this idea is that, in a configuration like (1), a local structural relation cannot hold between X and Y if Z is a potential bearer of the relevant relation and Z intervenes between X and Y.
This monograph presents an important extension of government-binding theory in syntax. It offers a new characterization of locality in the theory of government through a relativization of the Minimality Principle, and it explores the consequences of this approach for the Empty Category Principle and for the analysis of a variety of empirical domains, including intervention effects, that-trace phenomena, and argument-adjunct asymmetries.
The final part of the book is devoted to a new interpretation of the argument-adjunct asymmetries that arise in various extraction processes. Referential indices, a fundamental ingredient of the binding relation, are restricted to occur on referential arguments, as in Chomsky's original proposal. This natural restriction has the surprising effect of capturing the major argument-adjunct asymmetries in a straightforward manner while permitting a radical simplification of the Empty Category Principle. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ERPs were recorded from 24 undergraduates as they read sentences known to differ in syntactic complexity and working memory requirements, namely Object and Subject Relative sentences. Both the single-word and multiword analyses re-vealed significant differences due to sentence type, while mul-tiword ERPs also showed that sentence type effects differed for Good and Poor comprehenders. At the single-word level, ERPs to both verbs in Object Relative sentences showed a left anterior negativity between 300 and 500 msec postword-onset relative to those to Subject Relative verbs. At the multiword level, a slow frontal positivity characterized Subject Relative sentences, but was absent for Object Relatives. This slow posi-tivity appears to index ease of processing or integration, and was more robust in Good than in Poor comprehenders.
Two experiments explored the effects of stimulus degradation on behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures of semantic priming. The primary goal was to help elucidate the psychological processes that underlie the N400 component. In both experiments, subjects made speeded lexical decisions to words and pseudowords preceded by either semantically related or unrelated prime words. In one block of trials, the target stimuli were intact, and in a second block they were degraded by removing a random 33% of the elements making up each letter of the target (Experiment 1) or by overlaying a matrix of dots on the target (Experiment 2). In both experiments, subjects responded faster and more accurately to related targets than to unrelated targets (behavioral semantic priming effect), and this priming effect was greater when the target was degraded. However, although the N400 component was larger for unrelated than related targets (ERP semantic priming effect), there was no evidence that this difference was larger in the degraded block of either experiment. These results indicate that the behavioral and ERP measures reported here appear to be tapping into different components of the process(es) involved in semantic priming. The implication of the results for the linguistic processes underlying the N400 are discussed.
The work presented here is part of a research project on the on-line parsing of Italian sentences. In particular, I will discuss the processing of wh-questions with nonreferential (who) and referential (which-N) wh-items, which, following the analyses of Rizzi (1988) and Cinque (1989), are also distinguishable by the presence or absence of a chain relationship between the wh-item and the gap position. The hypothesis was that, in the case of chain length ambiguity, the parser will always choose the shortest one. This preference is expressed in the minimal chain principle (MCP), a principle that applies to the S-structure, determining the decisions made at ambiguous points and the complexity of unambiguous sentences. The results show that readers are sensitive to chain complexity, in that, following MCP, they always choose the shortest chain. The results are also in line with Cinque's analysis of the difference between classes of quantifiers, in that the MCP applies only to the quantifier who.
The present study investigates the processes involved in the recovery from temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded while subjects read German subject–object ambiguous relative and complement clauses. As both clause types are initially analyzed as subject-first structures, object-first structures require a revision which is more difficult for complement than for relative clauses. The hypothesis is tested that the revision process consists of two sub-processes, namely diagnosis and actual reanalysis. Applying a spatio-temporal principal component analysis to the ERP data, distinct positive sub-components presumably reflecting different sub-processes could be identified in the time range of the P300 and P600. It will be argued that the P600 is not a monolithic component, and that different subprocesses may be involved at varying time points depending on the type of garden-path sentence.
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. Words which were inconsitent with the “preferred” sentence structure elicited a brain potential (P600) quite distinct from the potential previously observed following contextually inappropriate words (N400). Furthermore, final words in sentences typically judged to be unacceptable elicited an N400-like effect, relative to final words in sentences typically judged to be acceptable. These findings suggest that ERPs are sensitive to syntactic anomaly, including anomaly engendered by disambiguating material following erroneous analysis of a syntactically ambiguous string (the “garden path” effect). We evaluate the speculation that the P600 and N400 effects are elicited as a function of anomaly type (syntactic and semantic, respectively).
Seemingly simple expressions may require an enriched form of interpretative processing. Verbs like began and finished can be used felicitously only when one of their arguments denotes an event (e.g., reading). However, such verbs commonly appear with noun phrases whose literal interpretations denote entities (e.g., the book). It has been suggested that readers and listeners have to undertake additional computations to interpret strings like began the book that are not required when the book is interpreted as an entity (e.g., Pustejovsky, 1995). If so, began the book should be harder to process than strings like read the book, when the verb does not require an argument that denotes an event, or strings like began the fight, when the argument denotes an event. Experiment 1 found evidence from eye movements showing that entity noun phrases take longer to process following verbs that require event arguments than verbs that do not. Experiments 2 and 3, using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, respectively, found that difficulty did not appear when verbs like began had arguments that referred to events. We interpret the results with respect to accounts of semantic processing.
We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read sentences, some of which contained an anomalous word. In the critical sentences (e.g., The meal was devouring…), the syntactic cues unambiguously signaled an Agent interpretation of the subject noun, whereas the semantic cues supported a Theme interpretation. An Agent interpretation would render the main verb semantically anomalous (as meals do not devour things). Conversely, the Theme interpretation would render the main verb syntactically anomalous (as the -ED form, not the -ING form, is syntactically appropriate for this interpretation). We report that the main verbs in such sentences elicit the P600 effect associated with syntactic anomalies, rather than the N400 effect associated with semantic anomalies. We conclude that, at least under certain conditions, semantic information is “in control” of how words are combined during sentence processing.
Eye movements were recorded as subjects read sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities. In accord with the garden-path theory of sentence comprehension, shorter reading times were found for sentences conforming to certain independently motivated parsing strategies (late closure and minimal attachment) than for comparable sentences which violate these strategies. Further, longer fixation durations were associated with the very first fixation in the region of the sentence which disambiguated the sentence, suggesting that the human sentence-parsing mechanism operates in a rather systematic fashion, immediately computing the structural consequences of fixated material for the analysis of preceding material. The pattern of regressive eye movements did not conform to the view that the parsing mechanism automatically returns to the beginning of the sentence to revise an incorrect analysis of linguistic material nor did it support the view that the parsing mechanism systematically backtracks through the sentence until the source of the erroneous analysis is located. Rather, the pattern of regressions indicated that the parsing mechanism typically engages in selective reanalysis, exploiting whatever information it has available about the type of error it has committed to guide its reanalysis attempts. Finally, it is emphasized that an understanding of the parser's revision procedures is essential to an explanation of why certain linguistic structures cannot be successfully parsed by humans.
In two experiments, we examined the recent claim (Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000) that verb-based implicit causality information is used during sentence–final clausal integration only. We did so by looking for mid-sentence reading delays caused by pronouns that are inconsistent with the bias of a preceding implicit causality verb (e.g., “David praised Linda because he…”). In a self-paced reading task, such pronouns immediately slowed down reading, at the two words immediately following the pronoun. In eye tracking, bias-inconsistent pronouns also immediately perturbed the reading process, as indexed by significant delays in various first pass measures at and shortly after the critical pronoun. Hence, readers can recruit verb-based implicit causality information in the service of comprehension rapidly enough to impact on the interpretation of a pronoun early in the subordinate clause. We take our results to suggest that implicit causality is used proactively, allowing readers to focus on, and perhaps even predict, who or what will be talked about next.
This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI, comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 28 Hebrew-speaking children with SySLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically-developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used three picture selection tasks. The results indicated that the children with syntactic SLI had a severe deficit in the comprehension of which object questions. Most of them performed randomly on these questions, and each of them performed significantly poorer than the control group. They understood subject questions better than object questions, and who questions better than which questions. These results join a growing body of evidence suggesting a deficit in sentences derived by Wh movement in syntactic SLI. We suggest that this deficit relates to the assignment of a thematic role to an element which moved across another argument of the same type. The second part of the study explored subtypes of SLI. We compared the comprehension of Wh questions in three groups of children with SLI: syntactic SLI (S-SLI or SySLI), lexical SLI (LeSLI), and pragmatic SLI (PraSLI). The results showed that whereas children with SySLI have a significant deficit in the comprehension of which object questions, children with LeSLI and PraSLI understand Wh questions without difficulty.
Simple Dutch declaratives and questions were presented in a grammaticality judgment task to assess the validity of the “active filler strategy” (AFS). The AFS predicts that moved constituents, such as the initial constituent of a Dutch sentence, will be assigned to the leftmost possible gap. This results in better performance on subject-initial than on object-initial sentences. These predictions were confirmed, supporting a “filler” driven account of gap filling where gaps may be postulated before or without identifying a missing constituent in the input string. The results argue against the existence of a bottom-up parser in which the presence of a gap is detected only when lexically present local phrases have been parsed.
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants processed case-unambiguous German subject and object WH-questions with either a long or a short distance between the WH-filler and its gap. A sustained left anterior negativity was observed for object questions with long filler-gap distance but not for short object questions. This negativity was modulated by individual differences in working memory capacity. No comparable negativity was elicited by WHETHER-questions which did not contain a filler-gap dependency. A positive-going ERP effect was observed for short and long object WH-questions at the position of the second noun phrase. We interpret the sustained negativity as reflecting working memory processes required for maintaining the dislocated object in memory. Processing costs associated with integrating the stored element into the phrase structure representation are indicated by the local positivity. These results support the notion of separable syntactic working memory and syntactic integration cost components as causes of processing difficulty in complex sentences.