Evidence for a universal parsing principle in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec

A series of eye-tracking studies on Santiago Laxopa Zapotec provides evidence for the universality of a parsing principle guiding human language comprehension

Matt Wagers' Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

"Chonnik" software, OpenSesame project files

Tablet software for touch-tracked picture matching experiments. Developed in the OpenSesame environment [http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/] for Android runtime*. *At least as of May 2018, recent releases of OpenSesame do not actively develop for the Android runtime and thus this software may be incompatible with newer versions of Android. OpenSesame developers suggest using the Windows runtime for Windows tablets

Data for the paper "Grammatical licensing and relative clause parsing in a flexible word-order language"

Data files from Experiments 1 and Experiments

English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable

English resumptive pronouns, as in "...the flowers that I don't know where IT came from," are enigmatic in that they are judged to be unacceptable, which would indicate that they are ungrammatical, but are regularly produced by native speakers, which is typically taken to indicate grammaticality. We report results from two studies: an acceptability judgment study on sentences with resumptive pronouns or gaps ("...the flowers that I don't know where _came from"), and a written production study which elicited sentences that required participants to produce either a gap or a resumptive pronoun in various island and non-island domains. We find that, in a given structure, resumptive pronouns are produced at a rate that negatively correlates with the acceptability of the corresponding structure with a gap in it. That is, where gaps are less acceptable, resumptive pronouns are more common. To account for these data, we offer a model of English production processes as sensitive to the acceptability of a planned utterance. When the system detects impending unacceptability, it may give up on the global plan to form a syntactic dependency. When this happens, a gap is no longer licensed and a pronoun is used to satisfy local subcategorization constraints

Competition among pronouns in Chamorro grammar and sentence processing

Much work on Binding Theory has implicitly assumed that reflexive anaphors are morphologically distinct from ordinary pronouns, and indeed in most of the world’s languages this seems to be so (Faltz 1977). Research on the comprehension of reflexive anaphors has likewise been concerned with linguistic systems in which reflexives and ordinary pronouns are morphologically distinct. Nonetheless, there are languages in which reflexive anaphors have the same morphological realization as ordinary pronouns. Two of these languages: - Old English (e.g. Faltz 1977, Keenan 2002, Bergeton & Pancheva 2011). - Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands. Chamorro is a verb-first language in which direct object pronoun forms precede the subject. Reflexive anaphors look like ordinary overt pronouns. Although the language can use special morphology to mark a verb whose direct object is reflexive, this special morphology is optional. This project investigates the syntax and processing of pronouns in Chamorro. On the syntactic side, we show: - Chamorro grammar treats reflexive anaphors differently from ordinary pronouns, despite the fact that they share the same morphological form. - These patterns support a competition-based theory of anaphora most similar to Safir’s (2014). On the processing side, we ask how comprehenders confront the challenge of processing morphological pronoun forms in Chamorro. - In a picture-matching experiment on tablet computers, participants were first presented with visual and linguistic context introducing two characters, and then had to match a target sentence with one of two pictures, one depicting a reflexive event and the other, a disjoint event. - Perhaps the most surprising result: comprehenders strongly prefer to construe overt pronoun forms as reflexive (bound) even when a disjoint construal is allowed. - We derive this result from a competition-based theory of anaphora, together with some of the Chamorro-specific facts just described

On the Universality of Intrusive Resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan

The literature on resumptive pronouns (RPs) has given rise to a rich taxonomy of the phenomenon. Despite the fact that RPs invariably have the morphosyntactic form of ordinary pronouns, they vary widely in distribution and function. In some languages RPs are grammatically licensed; depending on the language and the syntactic context, they might or might not realize traces, compete with gaps, exhibit reconstruction effects, and so on. In other languages, notably English, RPs are ‘intrusive’ (Sells, 1984). Kroch (1981), Asudeh (2004), Morgan and Wagers (2018), and others have proposed that intrusive RPs in English are ungrammatical products of the performance system -- productions that satisfy local well- formedness but not global well-formedness. This account predicts that in every language, regardless of whether it has grammatically licensed RPs, intrusive RPs could also be found. Here we test this prediction against evidence from Chamorro and Palauan. Previous accounts have maintained that Chamorro does not have RPs and Palauan has only RPs. On the basis of corpus and elicited production data from Chamorro, and a re-examination of the Palauan evidence, we argue that both languages have grammatically licensed RPs, as well as intrusive RPs. Their grammatically licensed RPs differ in form and distribution. At least in Chamorro, the distribution of intrusive RPs produced is similar to that in English

Hierarchical structure and memory mechanisms in agreement attraction

Data and analysis code (RMarkdown) to support the article of the same name by Julie Franck & Matt Wagers published in PLOS ONE, 2020