Attachment preferences and corpus frequencies in PP ambiguities: Evidence from Greek

The present study investigates the extent to which frequency affects Greek native speakers’ attachment preferences for structures involving ambiguous Prepositional Phrases. Analyses of samples from a written and a spoken Greek corpus were conducted in order to examine the frequency patterns of PP attachment in Greek. The results of the corpus analyses were contrasted to the findings of an on-line self-paced reading task which investigated the processing of ambiguous PPs. The results indicate that corpus frequencies correspond to parsing decisions on a coarse-grained (syntactic) level, and to a lesser extent on a fine-grained (lexical) level of analysis

Sentence processing strategies: some preliminary results on the processing of prepositional phrases in Greek

The present study reports on some preliminary results on the processing of ambiguous Prepositional Phrase structures in Greek. The study was conducted in order to investigate the attachment preferences of Greek native speakers in temporarily ambiguous Prepositional Phrase structures in Greek. An off-line sentence completion task introduced temporarily ambiguous sentence fragments in Greek, including four basic Greek prepositions: me, se, ja, apo. The verbs in each of the critical sentences were tested for semantic biases in a separate paper-and-pencil plausibility study. The results are discussed on the basis of recent theoretical frameworks in Sentence Processing

Motion verbs in Greek and German: Evidence from typically developing and SLI children

In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigated the expression of constructions involving manner-of-motion verbs with Greek and German adults as well as typically developing and SLI children at the age of 5-6 years. The results showed that the typically developing children, when describing motion events, differed from the adults in the integration of grammatical information into motion predicates. The SLI children on the other hand displayed problems with the use of grammatical aspect (Greek) and case marking (German) as well as with ambiguous constructions (Greek)

Στρατηγικές επεξεργασίας λόγου παιδιών και ενηλίκων: οι προθέσεις σε σώματα κειμένων και σε ψυχογλωσσικά πειράματα

The main aim of the present thesis is to investigate the extent to which lexical, frequency and language?specific grammatical factors affect Greek native speakers’ online attachment decisions for temporary ambiguous prepositional phrases. An analysis of a written corpus sample (ILSP corpus) and a sample of spoken language was conducted in order to assess the frequency of PP attachment in V?NP?PP structures. The corpus data were analysed on two levels (coarse grained vs. fine grained) in order to test the predictions of the Tuning Hypothesis (Mitchell et al., 1995) which predicts that the parser is expected to be “tuned” only to syntactic category (coarse?grained) information during on?line sentence comprehension. The analysis of the corpus data on a level at which only sentences with the prepositions me, se, apo and ja were taken into account allowed us to investigate whether frequency patterns are reflected on native Greek speakers’ online parsing preferences for sentences that included these four prepositions. In addition, the finegrained corpus analysis also included an examination of whether definiteness agreement in Greek extends to complex object DPs with prepositions me, se, apo and ja (see Stavrou & Tsimpli, 2009). Three groups of participants were recruited for the psycholinguistic tasks of the present study: two groups of monolingual Greek adults and a group of native Greek 11 to 12 year old children. The first group of adults conducted an off?line acceptability task including sentences in which PPs were either forced towards VP or NP attachment. The results indicated that acceptability ratings differed depending on the lexical choice of Ps in the sentences. The results of the second task, an online SPR task verified the results of the acceptability to a large extent. In addition, the analysis of participants’ mean reading times indicated that definiteness agreement had an effect on online processing but it largely depended on the choice of the preposition. The investigation of children’s online parsing preferences revealed that children at the age of 11 to 12 employ essentially the same parsing strategies as adults but are less sensitive to lexical information than adults. Taken together, the results of the corpus analyses and the psycholinguistic data indicated that although there is a degree of correspondence between frequency counts and parsing preferences, frequency alone cannot account for the pattern of the results of the present study

Data & Scripts for Katsika et al. (2022). The influence of case and word order in children and adults’ processing of relative clauses in Greek

Data and scripts for the reported analysis in our paper "The Influence of Case and Word Order in Child and Adult Processing of Relative Clauses in Greek

LAB special issue

Data and scripts for the analysis reported in our LAB paper "Bilingual children’s online processing of relative clauses: evidence from heritage Greek

The role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming

In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.</jats:p

The Influence of Case and Word Order in Child and Adult Processing of Relative Clauses in Greek

Previous cross-linguistic studies have shown that object relative clauses (ORCs) are typically harder to parse than subject relative clauses (SRCs). The cause of difficulty, however, is still under debate, both in the adult and in the developmental literature. The present study investigates the on-line processing of SRCs and ORCs in Greek-speaking 11- to 12-year-old children and adults, and provides evidence on relative clause processing in Greek—a free word order language. We conducted a self-paced listening task in which we manipulated the type of relative clause (SRC vs. ORC), the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled), and the type of relativizer (relative pronoun vs. complementizer). The results showed that SRCs were overall processed faster than ORCs, providing evidence that children follow similar processing strategies to adults. In addition, accusative case marking facilitated the processing of non-canonical structures in adults but less so in children. Children showed heavy reliance on word order, as they processed nominative and accusative pre-verbal NPs in exactly the same way, while they were strongly garden-pathed in ORCs with post-verbal nominative NPs. We argue that these results are compatible with the Competition Model

Evidence for a constituent order boost in structural priming

The study investigates the role of constituent order in structural priming. We report the results from a PO/DO priming experiment in German, in which we experimentally manipulated verb position in primes and targets. Significant structural priming effects occurred irrespective of whether verb position was the same in prime and target or not. However, additional similarity in constituent order was able to boost structural priming effects, with significantly stronger priming when the verb occurred in the same position in prime and target. We argue that existing one-stage and two-stage accounts of formulation struggle to account for the entire data pattern and propose an alternative account of formulation which can explain our results