Argument Realization in Thai

137 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.In order to investigate how children come to interpret omitted arguments, four experiments are reported involving Thai-speaking adults, English-speaking adults, Thai-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, and English-speaking 5-year-olds. Participants listened to nonce verbs in an intransitive frame embedded in short stories. Adults were tested in a forced choice comprehension test while children performed a sentence act-out task. Results revealed that adults and children in both language groups interpreted structurally intransitive novel verbs as having an unexpressed object argument when a potential object appeared as subject in the following sentence. This indicates that subjects made pragmatic inferences based on the discourse context: inferring an omitted object allowed them to preserve discourse coherence. Hence, in addition to syntactic bootstrapping, discourse context may be used as another cue in acquiring verbs.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: the case of Thai

In Indo-European languages, letter position coding is particularly noisy in middle positions (e.g., judge and jugde look very similar), but not in the initial letter position (e.g., judge vs. ujdge). Here we focus on a language (Thai) which, potentially, may be more flexible with respect to letter position coding than Indo-European languages: (i) Thai is an alphabetic language which is written without spaces between words (i.e., there is a degree of ambiguity in relation to which word a given letter belongs to) and (ii) some of the vowels are misaligned (e.g., /ε:bn/ is pronounced as /bε:n/), whereas others are not (e.g., /a:p/ is pronounced as /a:p/). We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with 3–4 letter Thai words (with vs. without an initial misaligned vowel) in which the prime was: (i) identical to the target, (ii) a nonword generated by transposing the two initial letters of the target, or (iii) a replacement-letter control nonword. Results showed a significant masked transposed-letter priming effect in the initial letter positions, which was similar in size for words with and without an initial misaligned vowel. These findings reflect that: (i) letter position coding in Thai is very flexible and (ii) the nature of the obtained priming effects is orthographic rather than phonological

Can the first letter advantage be shaped by script-specific characteristics?

We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several “nonaligned” vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน \u3cɛ:fn\u3e is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other “aligned” vowels are written and spoken in a corresponding order, as occurs in English (e.g., ฟาก is spoken as /fa:k/). We employed the forced choice decision paradigm of Adelman et al. (2010) to examine letter identification across letter positions in 3- and 4- letter Thai legal nonword pairs. Results showed an advantage of the initial letter position for the aligned legal nonwords, as occurs in Roman script (e.g., Scaltritti & Balota, 2013). However, for the nonaligned legal nonwords, an advantage of second letter position was found which is in line with the characteristics of these types of stimuli: the critical initial consonant occurs in the second letter position. These results highlight the importance of the initial phonological letter in Thai, which is crucial for mapping orthography to phonology and for lexical access. In conclusion, these results illustrate that initial letter advantage can be shaped by the characteristics of the orthography

Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase

Of the 24 possible orderings of the nominal modifiers Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective and the Noun, two specific patterns dominate the typology: Dem Num Adj N (as in English) and its mirror order N Adj Num Dem (as in Thai). This has been argued to follow from a universal underlying structure in which Adj forms a constituent with N first, Num scopes over that constituent, and finally Dem takes widest scope. We refer to noun phrase orders that follow this structure as scope-isomorphic. To test for general scope-isomorphic preferences in language users and assess a possible asymmetry between pre- and postnominal modifiers, we tested two linguistic populations with different NP orderings (English and Thai). Learners were exposed to a new language where modifiers were placed on the opposite side of the noun from their native language (i.e., English speakers learned that modifiers in the new language were postnominal and Thai speakers that they were prenominal). Crucially, though, learners were exposed only to single-modifier NPs (e.g., ‘car green’ or ‘car this’) but were not shown how modifiers were ordered relative to one another in multiple modifier phrases. In a test phase, participants were asked how to translate phrases with multiple modifiers into the new language (e.g., ‘this green car’). Speakers of both languages overwhelmingly inferred scope-isomorphic patterns (i.e., they preferred ‘car green this’ over ‘car this green’). We additionally found that Thai participants showed a stronger preference for scope isomorphism, suggesting the possibility that prenominal orders which violate scope isomorphism are particularly dispreferred. We will discuss these results in light of syntactic theory which predicts a pre-/postnominal asymmetry, but will also consider the possible influence of L2 knowledge (specifically Thai speakers’ knowledge of English) on these results, and outline future studies designed to tackle this issue

A Non-local Attachment Preference in the Production and Comprehension of Thai Relative Clauses

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one. Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We re-interpret previous proposals to suggest that a language favors the non-local noun if it passes at least one of two tests. (1) Modifiers can intervene between noun and relative clause. (2) Adverbs can intervene between transitive verb and direct object.