Squib: co-reference and adult language comprehension

There exists a large, rich and varied literature on the processing of pronouns and other anaphoric forms in the adult language comprehension literature. Rather than trying to review it all, an impossible task in a small space, certain findings will be discussed that are particularly informative either because they place strong constraints on the processing of co-reference and more generally on anaphora or because they pose problems or challenges for an adequate theory of anaphora processing.</p

Quantification at a distance and grammatical illusions in French

Recent research in psycholinguistics supports the hypothesis that retrieval from working memory is a key component of establishing syntactic dependencies in comprehension. This can result in so-called grammatical illusions. These illusions have been modeled as the result of a content-addressable retrieval process in sentence comprehension that allows grammatically inaccessible licensing elements to be reactivated, creating a spurious perception of acceptability. This article reports five studies that establish the existence of a new grammatical illusion involving quantification at a distance and the licensing of so-called de NPs in French. Our results suggest that this grammatical illusion is interestingly constrained by syntactic properties of the licensors. Specifically, quantifiers that independently participate in quantification-at-a-distance constructions were seen to create grammatical illusions to a greater extent than quantifiers that do not participate in that construction. Consistent with previous work on the nature of cues in memory retrieval, we suggest that this is the result of fairly specific abstract syntactic cues that guide retrieval of a licensing element. This article thus brings further evidence that syntax is crucially used to structure working memory over the course of a parse

No longer an orphan: evidence for appositive attachment from sentence comprehension

In this paper, we investigate the comprehension of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives. First, we present experimental evidence that suggests that nominal appositives and appositive relative clauses behave like other adjunct phrases with respect to ambiguity resolution (Experiment 1). Second, we show that an ambiguous nominal appositive can modify a distant syntactic head as easily across an appositive relative clause as across a restrictive relative clause (Experiment 2). Last, we show that syntactic repair is as successful across an appositive relative clause or parenthetical as it is across an at-issue restrictive relative clause (Experiment 3). Taken together, our results suggest that i) appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives are syntactically sited in a fashion comparable to restrictive relative clauses and ii) appositive phrases do not substantially reduce the availability of the syntactic material that precedes the appositive phrase as might have been expected if processing an appositive involved shifting attention to a higher structure, away from local preceding constituents. These results constitute an argument from sentence comprehension for a local syntactic attachment of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives (cf. Jackendoff 1977; Potts 2005; de Vries 2006), and against so-called orphan analyses of appositive content (e.g. Ross 1967; Haegeman 1988)