Grillo, Nino

Habboub, Sally

Lungu, Oana

White Rose Research Online

This is a repository copy of Canonicity effects are modulatedby matrix verb type.White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/132873/Version: Published VersionConference or Workshop Item:Grillo, Nino orcid.org/0000-0002-8224-365X, Habboub, Sally and Lungu, Oana (2015) Canonicity effects are modulatedby matrix verb type. In: 28th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 19-21 Mar 2015. eprints@whiterose.ac.ukhttps://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Canonicity effects are modulated by matrix verb typeNino Grillo1, Sally Habboub2 & Oana Lungu31Universität Stuttgart, 2University College London, 3Universidade Nova de Lisboanino@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de, s.habboub@ucl.ac.uk, olungu@fcsh.unl.ptLOCALITYSubject Relative Clauses (SRC) are easier to process than Object RelativesClauses (ORC) [King & Just 1991; Gibson 1998; Gordon et al. 2001; VanDyke & Lewis 2003; Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Lewis et al. 2006; Hale 2006;Kwon et al. 2013, among many others].(1) a. John criticized the reporter that e attacked the senator.b. John criticized the reporter that the senator attacked e.• Several factors have been shown to modulate locality effects (Person,Number, Animacy and Referentiality, a.o.)• Present work focuses on effects of Matrix Verb type and availabilityof Pseudo Relative interpretation.(PSEUDO)RELATIVES• Verbs differ in their ability to select for different types of comple-ments:– Across languages stative verbs typically only select for nominalcomplements.– Perceptual verbs, however, select for a number of clausal com-plements besides nominal complements.• Number and Type of clausal complements varies across languages.• In French, but not in English, Subject RCs under perceptual verbs canalso be interpreted as Pseudo Relative (PRs) (2).(2) JeanJohnahasvuseen[PR lethejournalistereporterquithatattaquaitattackedlethesénateur.]senator.‘John saw the reporter that attacked the senator.’RELATIVE CLAUSENP-adjuncts, denote properties of entitiesV′saw DPthe NPreporter CPthat attacked the senatorRC semantics:∃e [see(e) & EXPERIENCER(e)(John)& THEME(the unique reporter thatattacked the senator)(e)]PSEUDO RELATIVEVP complements/adjuncts, denote events.V′saw SCDPthe reporterCPthat attacked the senatorPR semantics:∃e ∃e’ [see(e) & EXPERI-ENCER(e)(John) & THEME(e’)(e) &attack(e’) & AGENT(e’)(the reporter)& THEME(e’)(the senator)]PR-FIRST HYPOTHESIS• (Grillo & Costa 2014): When PRs are available, everything else be-ing equal (e.g. lexical, contextual and prosodic factors), they will bepreferred over RCs.– Rationale 1: PRs have impoverished structures (Cinque 1992),– Rationale 2: PRs introduce information relevant to the main as-sertion of the sentence (Frazier 1990)– Rationale 3: PRs are supported by simpler contextual represen-tations than those required by RCs (Crain & Steedman 1985; Alt-mann & Steedman 1988).• PRs (but not RCs) are only selected by a restricted set of predicates,e.g. perceptual (see, hear) but not stative predicates (live with).(3) JeanJohnahascritiquécriticizedlethejournalistereporterquithatattaquaitattackedlethesénateur.senator.‘John criticized the reporter that attacked the senator.’ RC only• Grillo et al. (2014a,b): Manipulating PR-availability through MatrixVerb Type strongly impacts Relative Clause Attachment, indirectlysupporting PR-first• Grillo et al. (2015) Embedded clauses under perceptual verbs judgedmore acceptable and read faster when followed by PR-compatible thanRC-only continuation.• Today: Interaction of PR-availability and Locality.EXPERIMENT 1 & 2Goal: Assess effects of PR-availability on Locality in a PR-language.Means: We compared subject-object relatives introduced by PR-compatibleand RC-only verbs.• The PR/RC ambiguity is limited to Subject RCs (4)(4) LeTheprésidentpresidentahasvuseenlethejournalistereporterquethatlethesénateursenatorattaquait.attacked.‘The president saw the reporter that the senator attacked.’ RC onlyPrediction: Stronger effects of Locality in PR-compatible environments.Method: Self-paced Reading followed by comprehension question.Participants: 56 French native speakersDesign: 2x2 crossing Verb Type(PR-verbs vs. non-PR-verbs) and Locality(Subject vs. Object RCs). 24 sets of target sentences (4 versions each), 48unrelated fillers.A. PR predicate / Subject PR/RCSarah a aperçu le policier qui tabassait le chauffeur en pleine rue.B. PR predicate / Object RC-onlySarah a aperçu le policier que le chauffeur tabassait en pleine rue.C. RC-only predicate / Subject RC-onlySarah est divorcée du policier qui tabassait le chauffeur en pleine rue.D. RC-only predicate / Object RC-onlySarah est divorcée du policier que le chauffeur tabassait en pleine rue.Goal: Assess whether verb distinction alone can alternatively account forprior results by testing a non-PR language, English.• Grillo et al. (2014) show PR-first generalizes to a preference for even-tive over entity complements, including Small Clauses over NPs inEnglish.Prediction: Higher complexity of both Subject and Object RCs under percep-tual than under stative verbs in English.Method, Procedure and Design: Same as FrenchParticipants: 36 English native speakers.StimuliA. SC-predicate / Subject RC-onlySarah saw the policeman who was beating the driver in the street.B. SC-predicate / Object RC-onlySarah saw the policeman who the driver was beating in the street.C. RC-only predicate / Subject RC-onlySarah is divorced from the policeman who was beating the driver inthe street.D. RC-only predicate / Object RC-onlySarah is divorced from the policeman who the driver was beating inthe street.RESULTS FRENCHCORRECT RESPONSESPerceptualObjectPerceptualSubjectStativeObjectStativeSubject76% 91.5% 84% 90%PR RC0.000.250.500.75object subject object subjectpositioncorrectMean Correct AnwersTable 1: Results of linear mixed model fit for Attachment Preferences inExperiment 1. Items and participants were crossed random factors.contrast coefficient SE z-value p-valueLocality 0.8980 0.1949 4.608 4.06e-06 ***Vtype*Locality -0.7591 0.3872 -1.960 0.0499 *Interaction:contrast coefficient SE z-value p-valueLocality(PR/RC) 1.3728 0.4708 2.916 0.00355 **Locality (RC-only) 0.4413 0.4350 1.014 0.31V-Type(SRC) -0.4938 0.4665 -1.059 0.29V-Type(ORC) 0.5573 0.2511 2.219 0.0265 *• Locality effects not significant in RC-only environments.• Lower accuracy for ORCs in PR-compatible than RC-only environ-ments.FRENCH: READING TIMES AT EMBEDDED VERBPR RC2.62.72.8object subject object subjectpositionlogRTMean logRT at vcontrast Estimate Std. Error t valuePosition (V) -0.039508 0.013726 -2.878Main effect of Locality: Faster RTs for SRCs than ORCsNo effect of V-Type, no effects at other positions.RESULTS ENGLISHCORRECT RESPONSESPerceptualObjectPerceptualSubjectStativeObjectStativeSubject74.8% 79.8% 79.9% 87.3%PR RC0.000.250.500.75object subject object subjectpositionregionMean Correct Anwerscontrast coefficient SE z-value p-valueV-Type 0.4093 0.1912 2.141 0.03231 *position 0.5121 0.1921 2.666 0.00769 **• Main effects of V-type and Position:– Better performance with RC-Only than SC-Compatible Verbs.– Better performance with SRC than ORC across V-Type.ENGLISH: READING TIMES AT PREPOSITIONPR RC2.502.552.602.652.70object subject object subjectPositionMean log RT per conditioncontrast Estimate Std. Error t valuePosition (P) -2.996e-02 1.492e-02 -2.008• No effects at Embedded Verb• Main effect of Position at PP (one region downstream from embeddedV): faster RTs for SRCs than ORCs.• No effect of V-Type, no effects at other positions.DISCUSSION• We contrasted the processing of right branching SRCs and ORCs inthe environment of perceptual and stative verbs across a PR (French)and a nonPR (English) language.• Verb Type had a strong, but different, effect in PR langauges (e.g.,French) vs. non-PR languages (e.g., English): comprehension of RCsis worse under perceptual verbs, unless a PR analysis is made avail-able (SRCs in French).• This supports our hypothesis that a clausal complement analysisshould be preferred by the parser in these environments.• Consequences for Sentence to Picture Matching Task, a PR-compatible environment (ask us).• Asymmetry online vs. offline results.– Effect obscured by strength of Locality effect?– Alternatively: The parser might sometimes interpret the RC as aCenter Embedded subject modifier:(5) John saw [SC [DP the boy [CP that the girl kissed]] running]• This parse, only available at the earliest stages of processing, disap-pears when the sentence is over, creating confusion which ultimatelyleads to worse performance in non PR environmentsACKNOWLEDGEMENTS• We thank Andrea Santi for helpful comments and suggestions.• We are grateful to the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING) for enabling usto collect the French data.• This research is part of the project ‘Syntactic and lexical factors in processing complex-ity’ (PTDC/CLE-LIN/114212/2009) and the project ‘Crosslinguistic and Crosspopula-tion Acquisition of Dependencies‘ (PTDC/MHC-LIN/4812-2012) funded by the Fun-dação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.REFERENCES[1] Altmann & Steedman. 1988. Interaction with context during human sentence processing.Cognition, 30.[2] Cinque. 1992. The Pseudo-Relative and Acc-ing constructions after verbs of perception.University of Venice WPiL.[3] Crain & Steedman. 1985. On not being led up to garden path: The use of context by thepsychological parser. In Dowty, Karttunen & Zwicky (eds.)Natural language processing: Psy-chological, computational, and theoretical perspectives.[4] Cuetos & Mitchell. 1988. Cross-linguistic differences in parsing. Cognition, 30.[5] Frazier 1990. Parsing modifiers. special purpose routines in the human sentence process-ing mechanism? In Balota & and d‘Arcais (eds.) Comprehension Processes in Reading.[6] Gibson. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68.[7] Gordon, Hendrick & Johnson. 2001. Memory interference during language processing.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27.[8] Grillo & Costa. 2014. A novel argument for the universality of parsing principles. Cogni-tion, 133.[9] Grillo, Costa, Fernandes & Santi. 2014b. Highs and Lows in English Attachment AMLaP2014, Edinburgh.[10] Grillo, Pozniak, Hemforth & Santi. Pseudo Relatives are easier than Relative Clauses: Ev-idence from Tense. CUNY 2015, Los Angeles.[11] Hale. 2006. Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science, 30.[12] King & Just. 1991. Individual differences in syntactic processing: the role of workingmemory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30.[13] Kwon, Kluender, Kutas,& Polinsky. 2013. Subject/object processing asymmetries in Ko-rean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data. Language, 89.[14] Lewis & Vasishth. 2005. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilledmemory retrieval. Cognitive Science 29.[15] Van Dyke. 2007. Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents duringsentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,33.[16] Van Dyke & Lewis. 2003. Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment andrepair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal ofMemory and Language, 49.

Canonicity effects are modulatedby matrix verb type

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Canonicity effects are modulatedby matrix verb type

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