Contains reports on one research project.National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 TO1 HD00111-08)National Institute of Mental Health (Grant 5 P01 MH13390-07

Kornfeld, Judith R.

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IX. LINGUISTIC SAcademic and Research StaffProf. R. JakobsonProf. M. HalleProf. N. A. ChomskyProf.Prof.Prof.Prof.Prof.Prof.S. BrombergerJ. A. FodorM. F. GarrettK. L. HaleJ. W. HarrisL. J. KarttunenE. I. AllenA. D. AndrewsM. H. AronoffSarah J. BellIvonne A. BordeloisNomi ErteschikR. A. FaraciR. W. Fiengo, Jr.J. A. GoldsmithH. W. GrayF. R. HigginsProf. J. J. KatzProf. R. P. V. KiparskyProf. W. A. O'NeilProf. D. M. PerlmutterProf. Krystyna PomorskaProf. J. R. RossDr. S. R. AndersonDr. Milton BaxterDr. Carol E. ConradDr. J. HankamerGraduate StudentsD. KahnEllen J. KaufmanMary- Louise KeanW-C. M. KimT. J. KlokeidJudith R. KornfeldMiriam LemleJ. LenerzM. Y. LibermanSusan E. MartinDr. J. T. JensenDr. R. JongenDr. Frances E. KarttunenDr. Martha LaferriereDr. J. A. McGilvrayDr. Marga E. ReisDr. D. L. StampeA. T. HakulinenR. HurtigG. L. MilsarkR. T. OehrleP. B. PlateroA. S. PrinceP. T. SchwennDorothy SiegelA. W. SparerJ. R. VergnaudMary Lou WalchE. S. WilliamsE. F. WoisetschlaegerA. CLAUSE BOUNDARY ANDSENTENCE PERCEPTIONDOMINANCE EFFECTS ONNational Institutes of Health (Grant 5 TO1 HD00111-08)National Institute of Mental Health (Grant 5 P01 MH13390-07)Judith R. KornfeldDuring the immediate perception of a sentence, listeners determine the location ofgrammatical clause boundaries, and may even infer more complex syntactic propertiessuch as the dominance relations among clauses. These are the conclusions of severalrecent studies using the probe-latency method. This technique, as developed by Walkeret al. l and Caplan,2 involves presenting subjects with a series of sentences, each ofwhich is immediately followed by a word (the "probe"). Subjects must decide whetherthe probe occurred in the sentence just presented. They indicate their decisions on atwo-position response key; the experimenter measures Reaction Time (RT) as the inter-val between presentation of the probe and the subject's response.Caplan used this paradigm in an experiment with two-clause sentences and foundsignificant differences between mean responses to each clause; viz., listeners respondedfaster to probe words from the second clause than to probes from the first one, eventhough both words were equidistant from the end of the sentence, and were acousticallyQPR No. 110 177(IX. LINGUISTICS)the same. The following sentence pair illustrates his material:Probe(a) Now that artists are working in /OIL, prints are rare. / OIL(b) Now that artists are working fewer hours, /OIL prints are rare. / OIL(Slants enclose identical sections of tape which were spliced onto the left-hand portionof each sentence.)The RT difference was interpreted as a function of surface boundaries. But sincenearly all the test sentences were of the form(a) Subord. X, main. x(b) Subord. , X main. x(where X marks the position of the probe word in the sentence, and x denotes presen-tation of the probe immediately following each sentence), the effect could also be due todominance relations between clauses, as represented in the surface and/or underlyingphrase marker in the grammar.In order to decide whether this RT effect is due to surface clause breaks or to dom-inance properties, we performed two probe-latency experiments (EXP. I and EXP. II).The material in these tests included sentences with both clause orders and probe posi-tions: i. e.,X(a) subordinate ' mainX(b) subordinate ' mainX(c) main ' subordinateX(d) main ' subordinateThe clause boundary effect was highly significant in both studies, but the dominanceeffect only reached significance in EXP. II. Post hoc tests, however, revealed a strongmaterials effect in EXP. I that probably obscured the influence of dominance propertiesin that study.The source of the materials problem seemed to be both semantic and pragmatic.Some sentences described events that were only loosely connected in meaning; the"semantic dependency" between clauses in such sentences was weak. Others containedclauses with strong semantic dependency but with limited plausibility; these sentencescould be called "pragmatically" weak. Because of potential effects of these factors, thematerial was rewritten. The semantic dependency and plausibility of each sentence wasQPR No. 110 178(IX. LINGUISTICS)enhanced. When the revised material was tested on 88 subjects in EXP. II, all the maineffects reached significance:Dominance Effects:(1) Kind of clauseRTmain clauses RTsubordinate clauses(F = 4. 821; d. f. 1/21, p<. 04)(2) Order of clausesRT , ( RT ,main subord. subord. main(F = 6. 291; d. f. 1/21, p<. 01 5 )Boundary Effect:RTfirst clause) RTsecond clause(F = 14+, d. f. 1/21, p <<. 001)These results mean that both surface boundaries and dominance relations affect theearly perceptual analysis of sentences; yet the nature of the dominance effects is stillunclear. In particular, we need to determine whether the effect is syntactic, semantic,or possibly pragmatic. Actually there are several logical possibilities. The dominanceeffect could be a function of(1) exclusively semantic factors,(2) both syntactic and semantic factors,(3) exclusively syntactic properties (of clause relations in the grammar),or(4) pragmatic factors (such as plausibility of the events described in each sentence).The contrast between the results of the two experiments argues in favor of a seman-tic and pragmatic influence ((1), (2), and (4)). Just because the semantic dependencyand plausibility of the material were the only variables that were intentionally changedin EXP. II, they were probably responsible for the different results. Briefly, the syn-tactic effect of dominance did not show up until the semantic relations between clauseswere emphasized, and the sense made more plausible.This finding is important because it suggests that listeners determine much morethan syntactic facts alone during immediate perception: viz., once listeners begin toassign semantic and syntactic structure to a sentence, they also make decisionsQPR No. 110 179(IX. LINGUISTICS)about pragmatic factors such as plausibility of events, speaker's intended sense, etc.Thus our results lead to a model of sentence perception that includes at least threestages:(1) Syntactic - segmentation into structural units like clauses;(2) Semantic - determination of meanings of lexical items and sense of clauses andentire sentences;and(3) Pragmatic - determination of speaker's meaning in uttering a sentence.The problem now is to figure out the temporal order and sequence of these stagesin actual processing. Logically, the listener could start making decisions on all threelevels at the same time. This is particularly plausible with a constant feedback network.With more and more words entering the short-term memory of the listener, he couldstart determining phrase and clause structure, the meanings of individual words, andthe sense of events described by the sentence. Another possibility is that he would firstassign syntactic and semantic structure and then check to see whether the sentence madepragmatic sense. This model allows us to explain the contrasting results of the firsttwo experiments: it might be that dominance distinctions become relevant only at thepragmatic state ((3) above). Additional tests are needed to evaluate this possibility.Further ResearchThe results of these studies imply psychological reflexes of dominance relationsamong clauses, but the research is by no means conclusive. There must be morestudies to evaluate the syntactic or semantic nature of the effects. For this purpose,it is essential to use other kinds of sentence material, especially since the stimuli inEXP. I and EXP. II illustrated only one kind of clause structure, i. e., main clause +overt surface adverbial clause. Because this kind of sentence differs from other kindsof sentences containing relatives or complements, there might well be effects of thesesyntactic differences on immediate perception. 4 An experiment with several kinds ofsubordinate clauses is now in progress. Results from such a test should determinewhether syntactic distinctions among subordinate clauses affect the initial perceptionof sentences.References and Footnotes1. E. Walker, "Grammatical Relations in Sentence Memory," Ph. D. Thesis, Depart-ment of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969.2. D. Caplan, "Probe Tests and Sentence Perception," Ph. D. Thesis, Department ofLinguistics, M. I. T., 1971.QPR No. 110 180(IX. LINGUISTICS)3. Judith R. Kornfeld, "Clause Structure and the Perceptual Analysis of Sentences,"Quarterly Progress Report No. 108, Research Laboratory of Electronics, M. I. T.,April 15, 1973, pp. 277-280; "Syntactic Structure and the Perception of Sentences;Some Evidence of Dominance Effects," to appear in Proc. 9th Annual Meeting ofthe Chicago Linguistics Society, CLS, Department of Linguistics, University ofChicago, Chicago, Ill.4. Specifically, adverbial clauses (such as those used in Experiments I and II) modifythe entire sentence. In the tree structure, they are in a sense "free," since theyare loosely adjoined to the topmost-S; whereas other types of subordinates are"bound," since they are attached to an NP or VP node. Thus "boundedness" is asyntactic property defined on tree-structure geometry. In our view, it can be con-sidered a psychological concept. This approach to subordinate clause types allowsus to predict the possible influence of boundedness on sentence processing: Thereshould be little or no effect of dominance for two-clause sentences with adverbials(since they are loosely attached to the matrix-S); but there should be sizable effectswith relative clauses and complements (since they are more tightly bound to a sen-tence constituent, as well as being more deeply embedded than adverbial clausesthat modify the entire sentence).QPR No. 110 181

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