The resolution of the clause that is relative? Prosody and plausibility as cues to RC attachment in English: evidence from structural priming and event related potentials

In spoken language, different types of linguistic information are used by the parser to arrive at a coherent syntactic interpretation of the input. In this thesis I investigated two of these information sources, namely overt prosodic features and plausibility constraints. More specifically, I was interested in how these cues interact in resolving the relative clause attachment ambiguity. Much research has explored the single cues and much is know about the influence that each cue exerts independent of the other. However, the interaction of prosodic and semantic cues to attachment has to date received little attention. Two experimental paradigms were used in 4 experiments, i.e. the method of structural priming and the online method of event‐related potentials. The data from these experiments suggest that the cues interact in a complex way. The results imply that the prominence of the dispreferred cues, the surprisal and the type of revision associated with them play a major role during processing. I propose three processing principles that might account for the results observed

The Interplay Of Syntactic Parsing Strategies And Prosodic Phrase Lengths In Processing Turkish Sentences

Many experiments have shown that the prosody (rhythm and melody) with which a sentence is uttered can provide a listener with cues to its syntactic structure (Lehiste, 1973, and since). A few studies have observed in addition that an inappropriate prosodic contour can mislead the syntactic parsing routines, resulting in a prosody-induced garden-path. These include, among others, Speer et al. (1996) and Kjelgaard and Speer (1999) for English. The studies by Speer et al. and Kjelgaard and Speer (SKS) showed that misplaced prosodic cues caused more processing difficulty in sentences with early closure of a clause (EC syntax) than in ones with late closure of a clause (LC syntax). One possible explanation for these results is that when prosody is misleading about the syntactic structure, the parser may ignore it and resort to a syntactic Late Closure strategy, as it does in reading where there is no overt prosodic boundary to inform the parser about the syntactic structure of the sentence. Augurzky\u27s (2006) observation of an LC syntax advantage for prosody-syntax mismatch conditions in her investigation of German relative clause attachment ambiguities provides support for this explanation. An alternative explanation considers the possibility that constituent lengths could have influenced the perceived informativeness of overt prosodic cues in these studies, as proposed in the Rational Speaker Hypothesis of Clifton et al. (2002, 2006). The Rational Speaker Hypothesis (RSH) maintains that prosodic breaks flanking shorter constituents are taken more seriously as indicators of syntactic structure than prosodic breaks flanking longer constituents, because the former cannot be justified as motivated by optimal length considerations. To test these two alternative hypotheses, four listening experiments were conducted. There was an additional reading experiment preceding the listening experiments to explore potential effects of the Late Closure strategy and constituent lengths in reading where there is no overt prosody. In all cases the target materials were temporarily ambiguous Turkish sentences which could be morphologically resolved as either LC or EC syntactic constructions. Constituent lengths were systematically manipulated in all target materials, such that the length-optimal prosodic phrasing was associated with LC syntax in one condition, and with EC syntax in the other. Experiment 1 employed a missing morpheme task developed for this study. In the missing morpheme task, underscores (length-averaged) replaced the disambiguating morphemes and participants had to insert them as they read the sentences aloud. Results revealed significant effects of phrase lengths in readers\u27 syntactic interpretations as indicated by the morphemes they inserted and the prosodic breaks they produced. Experiments 2A and 2B employed an end-of-sentence `got it\u27 task (Frazier et al., 1983), in which participants listened to spoken sentences and indicated after each one whether they understood or did not understand it. Sentences in Experiment 2A had phrase length distribution similar to the SKS English materials. Experiment 2B manipulated lengths in reverse. The stimuli had cooperating, conflicting or neutral prosody. Response time data supported an interplay of both syntactic Late Closure and RSH. Thus it was concluded that constituent lengths can indeed have a significant effect on listeners\u27 parsing decisions, in addition to the familiar syntactic parsing biases and prosodic influences. Experiments 3A and 3B used a lexical probe version of the phoneme restoration paradigm employed by Stoyneshka et al. (2010). In the phoneme restoration paradigm, the disambiguating phonemes (in the verb, in these materials) are replaced with noise (in this study, pink noise). In the lexical probe version of this paradigm (developed for this study) participants listened to the sentences with LC, EC or neutral prosody, and at the end of the sentence they were presented with a visual probe (one of the two possible disambiguating verbs, complete with all phonemes) that was congruent or incongruent or compatible with the prosody of the sentence they had heard. Their task was to respond to the visual probe either `yes\u27 (i.e., `I heard this word in the sentence I have just listened to\u27) or `no\u27 (i.e., `I didn\u27t hear this word\u27). Response time to the probe word indirectly taps which of the disambiguating morphemes on the verb the listener mentally supplies when it has been replaced by noise. The materials for Experiments 3A and 3B were identical to those used in Experiments 2A and 2B respectively except that the disambiguating phonemes were noise-replaced. Results of Experiments 3A and 3B showed that listeners were highly sensitive to the sentential prosody as revealed by their phoneme restoration responses and response time data, confirming Stoyneshka et al.\u27s findings establishing the reliability of the phoneme restoration paradigm in investigating effects of prosody in ambiguity resolution. Response time data showed a pattern similar to what SKS observed for English (except for one condition in Experiment 3A, with incongruent probes): despite the phrase length reversal in Experiment 3B, there was no influence of phrase length distribution on ambiguity resolution. This has a natural explanation in light of the difference between the `got it\u27 task with disambiguating morphology within the sentence stimulus, and the phoneme restoration task in which the listener can project onto the verb whatever morphology is compatible with the heard prosody. LC and EC were processed equally well for congruent probes, and there was an LC advantage in the incongruent and compatible probe conditions. Overall results support the hypothesis that syntactic Late Closure becomes evident in listening when prosody is absent or misleading, and also that phrase lengths can play a significant role

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006), published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics—populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specific languages—and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that the current research trends in Slavic psycholinguistics are (1) a shift from adult monolingual participants to special population groups, such as children, people with aphasia, and bilingual learners, (2) a continuing move in the direction of cognitive neuroscience, with more emphasis on online experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging, and (3) a focus on Slavic-specific phenomena that contribute to the ongoing debates in general psycholinguistics. The current infrastructural trends are (1) development of psycholinguistic databases and resources for Slavic languages and (2) a rise of psycholinguistic research conducted in Eastern European countries and disseminated in Slavic languages

Implicit Prosody in Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment in Croatian

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages. (1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC]. In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and could therefore be innate. Five major explanations have been proposed in the literature to account for cross-linguistic differences in RC-attachment: the Construal/Gricean account, Attachment-Binding Dualism, the Predicate Proximity/Recency model, the Tuning Hypothesis, and the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH). This thesis examines RC-attachment preferences in Croatian. The data reported address four of the above proposals: they argue against the first three and support the fifth, the IPH. (The data do not bear on the Tuning Hypothesis, which holds that there is no principled parsing explanation for the cross-linguistic facts.) The IPH claims that a default prosodic pattern, which may differ across languages, is mentally computed during silent reading, influencing syntactic attachment decisions. Croatian has a distinctive pattern of prosodic phrasing in that in sentences comparable to (1), it favors a prosodic break before a long RC as compared with a short RC, and a prosodic break before the preposition in the complex NP construction as compared with the non-prepositional variant of the same construction. (Both variants of the construction, prepositional and non-prepositional, are acceptable in Croatian.) The experimental findings reported here document these prosodic characteristics, and show that they are reflected in syntactic attachment preferences in silent reading. This evidence is important because if the IPH is correct, then cross-language RC-attachment differences are attributable to independently demonstrable differences in the prosodic principles in the grammar. That is, they fall into line with other observed parsing preferences in that they do not reflect non-universal processing routines

Constituent Length Affects Prosody and Processing for a Dative NP Ambiguity in Korean

Abstract Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different prosodic phrasing than short phrases in a read-aloud task and change the preferred interpretation of globally ambiguous sentences. It also showed that speakers who have been told of the ambiguity can provide significantly different prosody for the two interpretations, for both lengths. Experiment 2 verified that prosodic patterns found in first-pass pronunciations predict self-paced reading patterns for silent reading. The results extend the coverage of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis [Fodor, J Psycholinguist Res 27:285-319, 1998; Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (Ed.), NELS 32 (pp. 113-132). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, 2002] to another construction and to Korean. They further indicate that strong syntactic biases can have rapid effects on the formulation of implicit prosody

Is cue-based memory retrieval \u27good-enough\u27?: Agreement, comprehension, and implicit prosody in native and bilingual speakers of English

This dissertation focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. I consolidate research from three distinct areas of inquiry\u27cognitive processing models, development of reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing strategies\u27and outline a cohesive and comprehensive processing model that can be applied to speakers regardless of language profile. This model is characterized by three critical components: a cognitive model of memory retrieval, a processing paradigm that outlines how resources may be deployed online, and the role of factors such as prosody in parsing decisions. The general framework of this integrated \u27Good-enough Cue\u27 (GC) model assumes the \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis and cue-based memory retrieval as central aspects. The \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis states that all speakers have access to two processing routes: a complete syntactic route, and a \u27good enough\u27 heuristic route (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002; Ferreira, 2003). In the interest of conserving resources, speakers tend to rely more on heuristics and templates whenever the task allows, and may be required to rely on this fallback route when task demand is high. In the proposed GC model, cue-based memory retrieval (CBMR) is the instantiation of the complete syntactic route for agreement and long-distance dependencies in particular (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009; Wagers, 2008). When retrieval fails using CBMR (due to cue overlap, memory trace decay, or some other factor), comprehenders may compensate by applying a \u27good-enough\u27 processing heuristic, which prioritizes general comprehension over detailed syntactic computation. Prosody (or implicit prosody) may reduce processing load by either facilitating syntactic processing or otherwise assisting memory retrieval, thus reducing reliance on the good-enough fallback route. This investigation explores how text presentation format interacts with these algorithmic versus heuristic processing strategies. Most specifically, measuring whether the presentation format of text affects readers\u27 comprehension and ability to detect subject-verb agreement errors in simple and complex relative clause constructions. The experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and embedded relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats: a) whole sentence, b) word-by-word, or b) phrase-by-phrase, and rated each item for grammaticality and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicate that while overall comprehension is typically prioritized over grammatical processing (following the \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis), the effects of presentation format are differentially influential based on group differences and processing measure. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody (phrase-by-phrase presentation) onto text enhances performance in syntactic and grammatical processing, while disrupting it via a word-by-word presentation decreases comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants however, phrase-by-phrase presentation is not significantly beneficial for grammatical processing\u27even resulting in a decrease in comprehension accuracy. These differences provide insight into the interaction of cognitive taskload, processing strategy selection, and the role of implicit prosody in reading fluency, building toward a comprehensive processing model for speakers of varying language profiles and proficiencies

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities in Declarative and Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the into phrase can only be interpreted as the goal argument of the verb. Thus, PP2 necessarily supplants PP1’s initially assigned position as goal, and PP1 must be reanalyzed as a modifier of the object NP (the paperwork). Interrogative versions of the same sentence structure (Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase?) may have a different profile. They have been informally judged to be easier to process than their declarative counterparts, because they are less susceptible to the initial garden path analysis. The study presented here represents an attempt to find a behavioral correlate of this intuitive difference in processing difficulty. The experiment employs the Double Reading Paradigm (Fodor, Macaulay, Ronkos, Callahan, and Peckenpaugh, 2019). Participants were asked to read aloud a visually presented sentence twice, first without taking any time at all to preview the sentence content (Reading 1), and then again after unlimited preview (Reading 2). The experimental items were created in a 2 x 2 design with one factor being Speech Act (declarative vs. interrogative) and the other being PP2 Status, i.e., PP2 could only be an argument of the verb iv (Arg), as above, or else PP2 could be interpreted as a modifier (Mod) of the NP within the preceding PP, as in She had / Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer of her filing cabinet(?). Participants’ recordings of Reading 1 and Reading 2 were subjected to prosodic coding by a linguist who was naive to the research question. Distributions of prosodic boundaries were statistically analyzed to extract any significant differences in prosodic boundary patterns as a function of Speech Act, Reading, or PP2 Status. Logistic mixed effect regression models indicated, as anticipated, a significant effect of PP2 Status across all analyses of prosodic phrasing, and a significant effect of Reading for both analyses of prosodic phrasing that included boundary strength. Speech Act was a significant predictor in one of prosodic phrasing, but the hypothesized interaction (between Speech Act and PP2 Status) was not significant in any model. Another analysis concerned the amount of time a participant spent silently studying a sentence after Reading 1 to be confident they had understood it before reading it aloud again (Reading 2). The time between readings is referred to as the inter-reading time (IRT). It was assumed that a longer IRT signifies greater processing difficulty of the sentence. Thus, IRT was hypothesized to provide a behavioral correlate of the intuitive judgement that the interrogative garden paths are easier to process than the declarative ones. If a correlate had been found, it would have taken the form of an interaction between the two factors (Speech Act and PP2 Status) such that the IRT difference between Arg and Mod sentence versions was smaller for interrogatives than for declaratives. Ultimately, however, no statistically significant interaction between Speech Act and PP2 Status was found. Further studies seeking behavioral evidence of the informal intuition motivating this research are proposed. Also offered are possible explanations for why the intuition is apparently so strong for some English speakers, and why, if so, it is not reflected in IRT. Significant ancillary findings are that interrogatives are in general more difficult to process than corresponding declaratives. Also, inter-reading time (IRT) in the Double Reading paradigm is confirmed as a useful measure of sentence processing difficulty given that within the declarative sentences, the garden-path (Arg) versions showed significantly longer IRTs than the non-garden-path (Mod) versions

COMMITMENT AND FLEXIBILITY IN THE DEVELOPING PARSER

This dissertation investigates adults and children's sentence processing mechanisms, with a special focus on how multiple levels of linguistic representation are incrementally computed in real time, and how this process affects the parser's ability to later revise its early commitments. Using cross-methodological and cross-linguistic investigations of long-distance dependency processing, this dissertation demonstrates how paying explicit attention to the procedures by which linguistic representations are computed is vital to understanding both adults' real time linguistic computation and children's reanalysis mechanisms. The first part of the dissertation uses time course evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking studies (reading and visual world) to show that long-distance dependency processing can be decomposed into a sequence of syntactic and interpretive processes. First, the reading experiments provide evidence that suggests that filler-gap dependencies are constructed before verb information is accessed. Second, visual world experiments show that, in the absence of information that would allow hearers to predict verb content in advance, interpretive processes in filler-gap dependency computation take around 600ms. These results argue for a predictive model of sentence interpretation in which syntactic representations are computed in advance of interpretive processes. The second part of the dissertation capitalizes on this procedural account of filler-gap dependency processing, and reports cross-linguistic studies on children's long-distance dependency processing. Interpretation data from English and Japanese demonstrate that children actively associate a fronted wh-phrase with the first VP in the sentence, and successfully retract such active syntactic commitments when the lack of felicitous interpretation is signaled by verb information, but not when it is signaled by syntactic information. A comparison of the process of anaphor reconstruction in adults and children further suggests that verb-based thematic information is an effective revision cue for children. Finally, distributional analyses of wh-dependencies in child-directed speech are conducted to investigate how parsing constraints impact language acquisition. It is shown that the actual properties of the child parser can skew the input distribution, such that the effective distribution differs drastically from the input distribution seen from a researcher's perspective. This suggests that properties of developing perceptual mechanisms deserve more attention in language acquisition research