Cross-domain priming from mathematics to relative-clause attachment: a visual-world study in French

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction

Proximity in agreement errors

International audienceAcross languages subject-verb agreement errors have been established when subjects are producing complex (NP PP) noun-phrases (see Bock, 1995, for an overview). Very recently, Haskell & MacDonalds (2002) proposed a locality-based principle, the principle of proximity, to explain a variety of agreement errors in production. They base they argument partly on preferences in verb number marking in sentences with disjunctive noun phrases (e.g., "the hat and the gloves" vs. "the gloves and the hat"), where they found a preference for number marking that matched the local noun. We will present a series of five written production experiments on German constructions with disjunctive Subjects, NP PP Subjects and Subject-Object-verb subordinate clauses. We will show that - although comparable effects can be established for German sentences with disjunctive Subjects - a proximity based principle fails to cover major portions of the results. We propose an account that highlights the dynamics of plural-feature activation and percolation

Acceptability Prediction by Means of Grammaticality Quantification

International audienceWe propose in this paper a method for quantifying sentence grammaticality. The approach based on Property Grammars, a constraint-based syntactic formalism, makes it possible to evaluate a grammaticality index for any kind of sentence, including ill-formed ones. We compare on a sample of sentences the grammaticality indices obtained from PG formalism and the acceptability judgements measured by means of a psycholinguistic analysis. The results show that the derived grammaticality index is a fairly good tracer of acceptability scores

Neurodynamics of executive control processes in bilinguals: evidence from ERP and source reconstruction analyses

International audienceThe present study was designed to examine the impact of bilingualism on the neuronal activity in different executive control processes namely conflict monitoring, control implementation (i.e., interference suppression and conflict resolution) and overcoming of inhibition. Twenty-two highly proficient but non-balanced successive French–German bilingual adults and 22 monolingual adults performed a combined Stroop/Negative priming task while event-related potential (ERP) were recorded online. The data revealed that the ERP effects were reduced in bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals but only in the Stroop task and limited to the N400 and the sustained fronto-central negative-going potential time windows. This result suggests that bilingualism may impact the process of control implementation rather than the process of conflict monitoring (N200). Critically, our study revealed a differential time course of the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conflict processing. While the ACC showed major activation in the early time windows (N200 and N400) but not in the latest time window (late sustained negative-going potential), the PFC became unilaterally active in the left hemisphere in the N400 and the late sustained negative-going potential time windows. Taken together, the present electroencephalography data lend support to a cascading neurophysiological model of executive control processes, in which ACC and PFC may play a determining role

Length Matters: Informational Load in Ambiguity Resolution

International audienceIn this paper, we will compare prosodic and pragmatic approaches to the role of constituent length in attachment ambiguities. Lengthening a constituent affects its informativity: longer constituents are usually less predictable (Levy & Florian, 2007) and demand a higher processing load than shorter ones (Almor, 1999). Following neo-Gricean accounts (Levinson, 1987 and 1991), increased informational load needs to be justified. This justification is achieved more easily when the long constituent conveys new information and when it relates to central elements of the utterance. Informational load is, however, not a simple question of length in numbers of characters or syllables but more likely a question of amount of information. In three off-line experiments using a cloze task, we will compare the effect of lengthening ambiguous prepositional phrases as in [1a/b/c] either by lengthening a city name or by adding information about the city. We will show that only lengthening by adding information increases attachment to a more central element of the utterance. These results will be discussed based on prosodic and pragmatic factors explaining the role of constituent length for attachment ambiguities. [1] Peter met the doctor of the lawyer from a. Apt. / b. Aix-en-Provence / c. the beautiful city of Apt

Prosodic Marking of Information Focus in French

This article addresses the controversial issue of the prosodic marking of Information Focus in French. We report the results of three experiments (one in production two in perception) that support three claims. The first one is empirical. Phrases that resolve a question may be set off by two types of intonational marks in French: they host the nuclear pitch accent (NPA) on their right edge and/or they are intonationally highlighted (IH). The second one is analytical: NPA placement is sensitive to the informational/illocutionary partition of the content of utterances, while intonational highlighting (IH) is sensitive to any type of distinguishedness: semantic or pragmatic. The third one is methodological: the "Question/Answer" pair provides a criterion to identify the Information Focus (i.. e. the part of content specifically asserted and making up the update brought about by the utterance) only it the answer is congruent. Congruence of answers is impossible to control in experiments based on question/answers pairs

Missing antecedents found

Numerous papers have used so-called 'missing antecedent phenomena' as a criterion for distinguishing deep and surface anaphora. Specifically, only the latter are claimed to licence pronouns with missing antecedents. These papers also argue that missing antecedent phenomena provide evidence that surface anaphora involve unpronounced syntactic structure in the ellipsis site. The present paper suggests that the acceptability judgments on which the argument is based exhibit a confound because they do not take discourse conditions on VPE (a surface anaphor) and VPA (a deep anaphor) into account. Two acceptability experiments provide evidence that what is relevant to the judgments are the discourse conditions and not the presence of deep vs. surface anaphors, casting doubt on the reliability of missing antecedent phenomena as a criterion for deep vs. surface status

Seeing events vs. entities : The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses.

We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative

Adaptation in Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Brazilian and European Portuguese

Previous research accounting for pronoun resolution as a problem of probabilistic inference has not explored the phenomenon of adaptation, whereby the processor constantly tracks and adapts, rationally, to changes in a statistical environment. We investigate whether Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) speakers adapt to variations in the probability of occurrence of ambiguous overt and null pronouns, in two experiments assessing resolution towards subject and object referents. For each variety (BP, EP), participants were faced with either the same number of null and overt pronouns (equal distribution), or with an environment with fewer overt (than null) pronouns (unequal distribution). We find that the preference for interpreting overt pronouns as referring back to an object referent (objectbiased interpretation) is higher when there are fewer overt pronouns (i.e., in the unequal, relative to the equal distribution condition). This is especially the case for BP, a variety with higher prior frequency and smaller object-biased interpretation of overt pronouns, suggesting that participants adapted incrementally and integrated prior statistical knowledge with the knowledge obtained in the experiment. We hypothesize that comprehenders adapted rationally, with the goal of maintaining, across variations in pronoun probability, the likelihood of subject and object referents. Our findings unify insights from research in pronoun resolution and in adaptation, and add to previous studies in both topics: They provide evidence for the influence of pronoun probability in pronoun resolution, and for an adaptation process whereby the language processor not only tracks statistical information, but uses it to make interpretational inferences.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio