Is It All Relative? Effects of Prosodic Boundaries on the Comprehension and Production of Attachment Ambiguities

While there is ample evidence that prosody and syntax mutually constrain each other, there is considerable uncertainty about the nature of this interface. Here, we explore this issue with prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities (You can $feel_A$ the $cat_B$ with the feather). Prior research has been motivated by two hypotheses: (1) the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) posits that attachment preferences depend on the size of the prosodic boundary before the ambiguous phrase (boundary B) and (2) the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH) links attachment to the relative size of boundary B and any boundary between the high and low attachment site (boundary A). However, few experiments test the unique predictions of either theory. Study 1 examines how syntax influences prosodic production. The results provide modest support for RBH and stronger support for ABH. In Study 2, we systematically vary the size of both boundaries in an offline comprehension task. We find that absolute boundary strength influences interpretation when relative boundary strength is held constant, and relative boundary strength influences interpretation when absolute boundary strength is held constant. Thus, our theory of the prosody syntax interface must account for effects of both kinds.Psycholog

Effects of Prosodic and Lexical Constraints on Parsing in Young Children (and Adults)

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238-299]. This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint-prosody-to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments ("You can feel the frog with the feather"). Four to six-year-olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200 ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun ("feather"). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500 ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities.Psycholog

Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-year-olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children's tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels.Psycholog

It Takes Two to Kiss, but Does it Take Three to Give a Kiss? Categorization Based on Thematic Roles

Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. Light-verb constructions, however, systematically violate these mappings; for example, some have ditransitive syntax (‘Romeo is giving Juliet a kiss’) but describe what appear to be agent–patient events (Romeo kissing Juliet). We used a conceptual sorting task to explore whether this non-canonical mapping influenced the interpretation of these sentences. Participants were trained to sort events by the number of thematic roles they encoded. After a training phase with only pictures, they sorted a mix of pictures and written sentences, including transitive agent–patient sentences, ditransitive source–theme–goal sentences and ditransitive light-verb constructions. Events described by light-verb constructions were most often grouped with agent–patient events but were sometimes grouped with source–theme–goal events. A control condition using the transitive/intransitive alternation for joint action verbs (e.g., ‘meet’) demonstrates that this is not attributable to misconstruing the task as syntactic sorting. We conclude that non-canonical mappings between meaning and form can affect event construal, but syntactic form does not solely determine the construal that is chosen.Psycholog

The Role of Thematic Roles in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Structural Priming in Young Children

The syntactic realization of a verb’s arguments is constrained by the role that the argument plays in the meaning of the verb. In most linguistic frameworks, these constraints are captured by mappings between syntactic functions and thematic roles. Such mappings clearly shape our interpretation of novel verbs. But there is controversy about when these mappings develop and whether they are employed in the processing of utterances containing known verbs. We explored these issues using the visual-world paradigm and structural priming during comprehension in 4-year-old children. In Experiment I, we found robust priming of dative constructions. This priming persisted when animacy cues were put in competition with argument structure, indicating that the locus of priming was either in syntax or in the mapping between thematic roles and syntactic functions. Experiment II demonstrated priming from locatives to datives indicating that this priming was not purely syntactic. Together these experiments provide evidence for the use of thematic mappings during sentence processing, independent of confounding syntactic or conceptual factors. We discuss the developmental implications, apparent discrepancies with the adult priming literature, and the compatibility of our findings with different theories of argument structure alternations.Psycholog

The Role of Functions and Motor Actions in Early Tool Concepts

Recent imaging studies have found activation in areas associated with motion processing and motor planning during a range of cognitive tasks involving tools. This has led some researchers to conclude that motor information is central to the conceptual representation of tools. To explore this hypothesis, we used a two-alternative forced-choice task to examine whether children and adults use motor information to determine the extension of new tool categories. Adults, 5-year-olds and 3-year-olds were introduced to a novel tool (“a dax”) and shown its function and how to manipulate it. Then two unlabelled tools were presented, one with the same function and one with the same motor manipulation. All three groups systematically extended the novel label to the tool with the same function rather than the one with same motor manipulation. Both 3- and 5-year-old children continued to extend by function when the function was imaginary and not perceptually accessible. We conclude that function is central to conceptual content of tool terms while motor information is not.Psycholog

Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as “implicit causality”. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightened Mary because she … with Sally feared Mary because she…). A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs. However, such studies have focused on a small number of specially selected verbs. In Experiment 1, we find that existing taxonomies perform near chance at predicting pronoun-resolution bias on a large set of representative verbs. However, a more fine-grained taxonomy recently proposed in the linguistics literature does significantly better. In Experiment 2, we tested all 264 verbs in two of the narrowly defined verb classes from this new taxonomy, finding that pronoun-resolution biases were categorically different. These findings suggest that the semantic structure of verbs tightly constrains the interpretation of pronouns in causal sentences, raising challenges for theories which posit that implicit causality biases reflect world knowledge or arbitrary lexical features.Psycholog

The Use of Lexical and Referential Cues in Children’s Online Interpretation of Adjectives

Recent research on moment-to-moment language comprehension has revealed striking differences between adults and preschool children. Adults rapidly use the referential principle to resolve syntactic ambiguity, assuming that modification is more likely when there are 2 possible referents for a definite noun phrase. Young children do not. We examine the scope of this phenomenon by exploring whether children use the referential principle to resolve another form of ambiguity. Scalar adjectives (big, small) are typically used to refer to an object when contrasting members of the same category are present in the scene (big and small coins). In the present experiment, 5-year-olds and adults heard instructions like “Point to the big (small) coin” while their eye-movements were measured to displays containing 1 or 2 coins. Both groups rapidly recruited the meaning of the adjective to distinguish between referents of different sizes. Critically, like adults, children were quicker to look to the correct item in trials containing 2 possible referents compared with 1. Nevertheless, children's sensitivity to the referential principle was substantially delayed compared to adults', suggesting possible differences in the recruitment of this top- down cue. The implications of current and previous findings are discussed with respect to the development of the architecture of language comprehension.LinguisticsPsycholog

Cascading Activation Across Levels of Representation in Children's Lexical Processing

Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit measures of incremental activation of semantic representations during word recognition in children. Five-year-olds were instructed to select a target (logs) while their eye-movements were measured to a competitor (key) that was semantically related to an absent phonological associate (lock). We found that like adults, children made increased looks to competitors relative to unrelated control items. However unlike adults, children continued to look at the competitor even after the target word was uniquely identified and were more likely to incorrectly select this item. Altogether, these results suggest that early lexical processing involves cascading activation but less efficient resolution of competing entries.Psycholog

Logic and Conversation Revisited: Evidence For a Division Between Semantic and Pragmatic Content in Real Time Language Comprehension

The distinction between semantics (linguistically encoded meaning) and pragmatics (inferences about communicative intentions) can often be unclear and counterintuitive. For example, linguistic theories argue that the meaning of some encompasses the meaning of all while the intuition that some implies not all results from an inference. We explored how online interpretation of some evolves using an eye-tracking while listening paradigm. Early eye-movements indicated that while some was initially interpreted as compatible with all, participants began excluding referents compatible with all approximately 800 ms later. These results contrast with recent evidence of immediate inferencing and highlight the presence of bottom-up semantic–pragmatic interactions which necessarily rely on initial access to lexical meanings to trigger inferences.Psycholog