Immediate Effects of Discourse and Semantic Context in Syntactic Processing: Evidence from Eye-Tracking

We monitored readers' eye-movements to examine the time-course of discourse and semantic influences in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Our results indicate immediate and simultaneous influences of referential context and local semantic fit in the reading of reduced relative clauses (i.e.. The horse raced past the bam fell.). These results support a model of sentence processing in which alternatives of a syntactic ambiguity are differentially activated by the bottom-up input, and syntactically-relevant contextual constraints simultaneously add activation to their supported alternatives. Competition between comparably active alternatives may then cause slowed reading times in regions of ambiguity

Parafoveal and Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Subjects were presented with strongly past-participle biased sentences such as, Tlie portrait sketched by the tree was very beautiful, in a self-paced reading time task. Sentences were displayed two words at a lime, (e.g.. The portrait /sketched by ...) so that the verb and the disambiguating preposition were read together. In Experiment 1, a set of materials constructed to minimize the past-tense bias with an inanimate N P was compared with a less constraining set of sentences. The syntactic gardenpalh usually associated with the reducedrelative construction was not present with the more constraining materials, but was with the less constraining N P sentences. In Experiment 2. using only the more constraining materials, preposition lengdi was manipulated so that subjects read sentences with both short (i.e., by) and long (i.e., underneath) prepositions. No syntactic gardenpaths occurred with sentences with the past-participle bias and short prepositions; however, when the same sentences were read with the long prepositions, the syntactic gardenpath was present This result is inconsistent with a deterministic parser. W e expand on our previous proposals that the parser must be able to take into account both semantic and verb-form information, as well as, the amount of disambiguating information (in the form of a preposition) that can be integrated with the ambiguous verb

Eye Movements Accompanying Language and Action in a Visual Context: Evidence Against Modularity

is commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially processed by modules that are encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. W e were able to observe the effects of relevant visual context on the rapid mental processes that accompany spoken language comprehension by recording eye movements using a head-mounted eye-tracking system while subjects followed instructions to manipulate real objects. Under conditions that approximate an ordinary language environment, incorporating goal-directed action, the visual context influenced spoken word recognition and mediated syntactic processing, even during the earliest moments of language processing

Sentence comprehension before and after 1970: Topics, debates and techniques

[EN] Language Down the Garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them

Thematic Roles in Language Processing

We present some ideas about how thematic roles (case roles) associated with verbs are used during on-line language comprehension along with some supporting experimental evidence. The basic idea, following Cottrell (1985), is that all of the thematic roles associated with a verb are activated in parallel when the verb is encountered. In addition, we propose that thematic roles are provisionally assigned to arguments of the verbs as soon as possible, with any thematic roles incompatible with such an assignment becoming inactive. Active thematic roles that are not assigned arguments within the sentence are entered into the discourse model as unspecified entities or addresses. In our first experiment we show that temporary garden-paths arise when subjects initially assign the wrong sense to a verb as in Bill passed the test to his friend, but not when subjects initially assign the wrong role to the noun phrase, as in Bill loaded the car onto the platform. This prediction follows directly from our assumptions. In our second experiment we show that definite noun phrases without explicit antecedents in the preceding discourse can be more readily integrated into a preceding discourse when they can be indexed to an address created by an open thematic role

Integrating Discourse and Local Constraints in Resolving Lexical Thematic Ambiguities

We conducted sentence completion and eye-tracking reading experiments to examine the interaction of multiple constraints in the resolution of a lexical thematic ambiguity. The ambiguity was introduced with prepositional "by"-phrases in passive constructions, which can be ambiguous between agentive and locative interpretations (e.g., "built by the contractor" versus "built by the corner"). The temporarily ambiguous sentences were embedded in contexts that created expectations for one or the other interpretation. The constraints involved, including discourse-based expectations, verb biases, and contingent lexical frequencies, were independently quantified with a corpus analysis and a rating experiment. Our results indicate that there was an interaction of contextual and more local factors such that the effectiveness of the contexts was mediated by the local biases. Application of an explicit integration-competition model to the off-hne (sentence completion) and on-line (eye-tracking) results suggests that, during the processing of these ambiguous prepositional phrases, there was an immediate and simultaneous integration of the relevant constraints resulting in competition between partially active alternative interpretations

Inferences in Snetenc Processing: The Role of Constructed Representations

Recent studies have revealed interesting differences between lexical decision and naming tasks. Naming responses seem to be primarily sensitive tolexical processes and lexical decisions to both lexical and message-level processes. This differential sensitivity to level of representation was used to investigate the following questions: 1) Are probable instruments for an action routinely inferred during sentence comprehension? Previous work may have failed to show that instrximents are inferred, in part, because processing measures were used that were relatively insensitive to the level of representation involved in the inference and 2) If instruments are inferred,does this process require accessing elements of the linguistic or the constructed representation? Four experiments were performed that used cross modallexical decision and naming tasks as measures of instrtunent priming in sentences that implied the use of an instrviment. No priming was found for sentences with no context, replicating Dosher and Corbett (1982). When sentences were preceded by a context that explicitly mentioned the instrument,however, priming was found with the lexical decision task. In combination with the result of the first two experiments, this suggests that instrument sare inferred when the instrument implied by a sentence is available from the context but not when sentences are presented without contexts. Priming was not foxind with the naming task, however. The lexical decision/naming data together suggest that making an instrument inference involves accessing elements of a constructed representation of the discourse.In addition, in sentences that contained pronoxins that referred to the instruments, priming was found for appropriate referents with the lexical decision task but not with naming. This suggests that locating antecedents for pronouns also involves a constructed representation

Tit-­‐‑for-­‐‑Tat: Effects of Feedback and Speaker Reliability on ListenerComprehension Effort

Miscommunication is often seen as a detrimental aspectof human communication. However, miscommunicationcan differ in cause as well as severity. What distinguishesa miscommunication where conversation partnerscontinue to put forth the effort from miscommunicationwhere conversation partners simply give up? In this eye-­‐‑tracking study, participants heard globally ambiguousstatements that were either a result of an experimentalerror or speaker underspecification; participants eitherreceived positive or negative feedback on theseambiguous trials. We found that negative feedback,paired with the reliability of the message, will impact theamount of processing effort a comprehender putsforth—specifically, listeners were less forgiving of errorswhen they were penalized and when speakers’instructions lacked effort. This suggests that languageusers weigh conversational contexts and outcomes aswell as linguistic content during communication