Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences? : A permutation analysis

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investi-gated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence struc-ture conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing

Processing tense/aspect-agreement violations on-line in the second language : a self-paced reading study with French and German L2 learners of English

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *Last week, James has gone swimming every day) in their on-line comprehension. The L2 learners were equally able to distinguish correctly the past simple from the present perfect as measured by a traditional cloze test production task. They were also both able to assess the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment task. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigated whether they could access this knowledge during real-time processing. Despite performing similarly in the explicit tasks, the two learner groups processed the experimental items differently from each other in real time. On-line, only the French L2 learners were sensitive to the mismatch conditions in both the past simple and the present perfect contexts, whereas the German L2 learners did not show a processing cost at all for either mismatch type. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 groups can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1): namely, only those whose L1 has grammaticized aspect (French) were sensitive to the tense/aspect violations on-line, and thus could be argued to have implicit knowledge of English tense/aspect distinctions

Parsing as incremental restructuring

A prevalent trend in modeling human sentence processing has been to account for both initial attachment preferences and reanalysis behaviors with minimal extensions to a presumed set of initial parsing operations. Here, an entirely different formulation of the initial attachment and revision processes is suggested. Rather than assuming that all parsing is (as much as possible) initial attachment, the opposite approach is advocated: that all parsing---even initial attachment---is restructuring. The realization of parsing as restructuring arises from a set of independently motivated computational assumptions within the competitive attachment architecture, a hybrid connectionist model of the human sentence processor. Central to the model is a unique parallel attachment operation that simultaneously attaches the current input phrase, while reattaching previously structured phrases. Within this model, reanalysis is not a separate process or module, but rather a side effect of the primary means of forming syntactic structures. The ease of performing possible reanalyses is therefore determined by the same conditions, such as recency and lexical preferences, that affect initial attachments. Furthermore, independently motivated constraints on the network structure determine the allowable syntactic configurations that may undergo restructuring within the competitive attachment operation. The model thus also provides a computational explanation of gardenpath sentences, in which automatic reanalysis is impossible