Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing – Essays in Honor of Lyn Frazier
Katy Carlson, Morehead State University
Charles Clifton, Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst
Janet Dean Fodor, City University of New York
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Lyn Frazier’s contributions to psycholinguistics: An appreciation. Charles Clifton, Jr., Brian Dillon, and Adrian Staub
Part I: Prosody in Language Processing
Chapter 2: Center-embedded sentences: An online problem or deeper?. Janet Dean Fodor, Danielle Ronkos, Benjamin Macaulay, Tyler Peckenpaugh, and Taletha Callahan
Chapter 3 Contrastive prosody and the subsequent mention of alternatives during discourse processing. Amy Schafer, Amber Camp, Hannah Rohde, and Theres Grüter
Part II: Syntactic Processing
Chapter 4: Alternatives on demand and locality: Resolving discourse-linked wh-phrases in sluices. Jesse Harris
Chapter 5: The division of labor between structure building and feature checking during sentence comprehension. Markus Bader
Chapter 6: Processing individual/degree polysemy. Margaret Grant, Sonia Michniewicz, and Jessica Rett
Chapter 7: Negative polarity items as collocations: Experimental evidence from German. Frank Richter and Janina Rad?
Chapter 8: Processing of wh-movement and scrambling differs in simple Russian sentences. Irina A. Sekerina, Anna K. Laurinavichyute, and Olga V. Dragoy
Part III: Semantics and Pragmatics in Language Processing
Chapter 9: When all linguists did not go to the workshop, none of the Germans but some of the French did: The role of alternative constructions for quantifier scope. Barbara Hemforth and Lars Konieczny
Chapter 10: Definites, domain restriction, and discourse structure in online processing. Florian Schwarz
Chapter 11: Processing coercion in Brazilian Portuguese: Grinding objects and packaging substances. Suzi Lima
Chapter 12: Processing adjuncts: Construal revisited. Britta Stolterfoht, Holger Gauza, and Melanie Störzer
Part IV: Applications and Extensions of Language Processing Research
Chapter 13: : Event knowledge and verb knowledge predict sensitivity to different aspects of semantic anomalies in aphasia. Michelle Colvin, Tessa Warren, and Michael Walsh Dickey
Chapter 14: Who cares what who prefers? A study in judgment differences between linguists and non-linguists. Gisbert Fanselow, Jana Häussler, and Thomas Weskott
Chapter 15: How just is justice? Ask a psycholinguist. Janet Randall
Chapter 16: C-command in discourse: Syntactic principles beyond the sentence and their consequences for acquisition theory. Tom Roeper
ABSTRACTS
Chapter 1: Lyn Frazier’s contributions to psycholinguistics: An appreciation. Charles Clifton, Jr., Brian Dillon, and Adrian Staub
ABSTRACT
The authors of this introductory chapter express their gratitude for the many contributions Lyn Frazier has made to the field of psycholinguistics and to her students, colleagues, and friends. Her introduction of garden-path theory gave new life to the study of sentence comprehension and shaped research on the topic for many years. Throughout her career, she has provided stimulating, often controversial, analyses of how ellipses are processed and of the roles semantics and prosody play in understanding language. Her lively curiosity has led her to explore many other topics in psycholinguistics, including effects of discourse structure and of not-at-issue content, among others. The chapter concludes with an appreciation of the impact she has had as a mentor, colleague, and collaborator, as well as a few remembrances of Lyn’s particular style as a scientist.
Part I: Prosody in Language Processing
Chapter 2: Center-embedded sentences: An online problem or deeper?. Janet Dean Fodor, Benjamin Macaulay, Danielle Ronkos, Taletha Callahan, and Tyler Peckenpaugh
ABSTRACT
For gathering data on syntax-prosody relations, it has been unclear how to proceed experimentally. This is especially so for complex syntactic structures, such as the doubly center-embedded relative clause construction, which is syntactically well-formed but notoriously difficult to parse. These complex sentences can be especially revealing theoretically but cannot easily be elicited from speakers by presentation of picture choices or written preambles. While acknowledging that it may not be ideal, many studies of these and other complex constructions have resorted to a simple methodology in which written target sentences are read aloud. A basic methodological decision is then whether or not to permit (or encourage) the reader to preview the text before voicing it aloud. The results of reading with preview and of reading ‘cold’ without preview can both be informative, but in different ways. Reading without preview taps on-line performance, which can reveal possible syntactic/semantic expectations, and may shed light on the implicit prosody of silent reading. Reading with preview should provide a better window on prosodic competence: the reader’s inherent knowledge of the prosody/syntax alignment principles of the grammar. However, we maintain that previewing by reading aloud, as in the Double Reading design that we report on here, can be more informative of prosodic competence than the typical silent reading preview.
Chapter 3 Contrastive prosody and the subsequent mention of alternatives during discourse processing. Amy Schafer, Amber Camp, Hannah Rohde, and Theres Grüter
ABSTRACT
Linguistic research has long viewed prosody as an important indicator of information structure in intonationally rich languages like English. Correspondingly, numerous psycholinguistic studies have shown significant effects of prosody, particularly with respect to the immediate processing of a prosodically prominent phrase. Although co-reference resolution is known to be influenced by information structure, it has been less clear whether prosodic prominence can affect decisions about next mention in a discourse, and if so, how. We present results from an open-ended story continuation task, conducted as part of a series of experiments that examine how prosody influences the anticipation and resolution of co-reference. Overall results from the project suggest that prosodic prominence can increase or decrease reference to a saliently pitch-accented phrase, depending on additional circumstances of the referential decision. We argue that an adequate account of prosody’s role in co-reference requires consideration of how the processing system interfaces with multiple levels of linguistic representation.
Part II: Syntactic Processing
Chapter 4: Alternatives on demand and locality: Resolving discourse-linked wh-phrases in sluices. Jesse Harris
ABSTRACT
Previous studies have observed a tendency to associate the remnant (e.g., who) of ambiguous sluicing ellipsis with the closest / most local correlate (someone) in the matrix clause, as in Somebody said Fred fired someone, but I don’t know who. I present the results of three experiments investigating the interplay between locality and the discourse status of potential correlates. The studies exploit the discourse-linking property of which-phrases in ambiguous sluiced sentences, like A teacher scolded Max or Dotty, but I can’t remember which one, to explore whether the preference for more local correlates is modulated by the discourse status of the potential correlates. I propose a discourse economy constraint (Alternatives on Demand: Avoid positing new discourse alternatives without evidence), which interacts with structural constraints like locality. Evidence from several questionnaire studies, as well as two online self-paced reading studies, supports the predictions of a sentence processing model in which the discourse status of items in memory immediately impacts the retrieval of a correlate for the remnant of sluicing ellipsis. In addition, the time point at which the interaction between processing biases appears is shown to depend on the strength or diagnosticity of the retrieval cues in the remnant of the sluice.
Chapter 5: The division of labor between structure building and feature checking during sentence comprehension. Markus Bader
ABSTRACT
The two-stage architecture of the Garden-Path Theory with its separation of first- and second-pass parsing has been replaced by simpler architectures in certain probability-based models of the human parser, including the Surprisal Theory. Based on evidence from subject-object ambiguities in German, this paper argues that the two-stage architecture still provides a better account of the garden-path strength observed for object-before-subject sentences in German. In the first part of the paper, corpus findings concerning the relationship between animacy and word order are discussed. Although animacy information is an important predictor of word-order in German, the Surprisal Theory does not predict differences in garden-path strength related to this information because animacy constrains word order only in combination with the verb’s argument structure. Because garden-path strength in verb-final clauses, as they are found in German, is a function of the verb’s expectedness according to the Surprisal Theory, verb specific information itself cannot affect garden-path strength in this theory. In the second part of the paper, a specific implementation of a two-stage model of garden-path recovery, the Linking-and-Checking model, is discussed. This model accounts for the dependence of garden-path strength in object-before-subject sentences on animacy as well as for findings concerning the use of subject-verb agreement for garden-path recovery.
Chapter 6: Processing individual/degree polysemy. Margaret Grant, Sonia Michniewicz, and Jessica Rett
ABSTRACT
The field of semantic processing has had a focus on understanding when semantic commitments are made during real-time processing. In this paper, we examine the processing of individual/degree polysemy, which can be used to address this line of inquiry. Individual/degree polysemy refers to the ability of Determiner Phrases to denote degrees corresponding to some measure of an individual in addition to the individuals themselves (their canonical denotation). For example, in certain contexts a Determiner Phrase such as the pizzas may be used to denote an amount of pizzas, rather than the salient plurality of pizzas. We discuss the empirical phenomenon of individual/degree polysemy, and then report the results of one study of eye movements during reading and one study of self-paced reading. These experiments test whether there is immediate commitment to either an individual or a degree interpretation during on-line processing. Our results provide evidence for immediate commitments, although the direction of the commitment depends on the internal properties of the Determiner Phrase.
Chapter 7: Negative polarity items as collocations: Experimental evidence from German. Frank Richter and Janina Rad?
ABSTRACT
We present experimental findings that support the hypothesis that NPI licensing requirements pattern with well-formedness conditions on frozen syntactic-semantic features of idiomatic expressions. Subsuming idiomatic phrases under the more general category of (not necessarily idiomatic) collocationally restricted complex expressions, we take our results as evidence for a theory of NPIs which interprets their licensing in syntactically delimited negative environments as an instance of satisfying the well-formedness constraints of a collocation that comprises a semantic restriction. The lexically variable negation component of NPIs is seen as a semantic co-occurrence requirement of a complex collocation.
Chapter 8: Processing of wh-movement and scrambling differs in simple Russian sentences. Irina A. Sekerina, Anna K. Laurinavichyute, and Olga V. Dragoy
ABSTRACT
The theory of sentence processing proposed by Lyn Frazier is based on (a) interaction of grammatical parameters and sentence processing strategies, and (b) cross-linguistic validation (Frazier, 2013). In this article, we present the results of two Visual World paradigm (VWP) experiments that investigated comprehension of simple Russian Wh-questions in which the type of question (subject vs. object) was crossed with scrambled word order (Verb-object/subject vs. object/subject-Verb). The generative grammar postulates a filler-gap dependency in the object Wh-questions, no dependency in the subject Wh-questions, but it is unclear what happens in the short-distance Scrambling. In sentence processing, the Trace Reactivation hypothesis provides empirical evidence for filler-gap dependencies when the filler is reactivated at the gap position. For object Wh-questions, our eye-movement data are inconclusive as they are consistent with the Trace Reactivation hypothesis as well as with question-answering strategy. For Scrambling, there was no evidence of reactivation of the filler in the looks. Our findings suggest that either (a) in contrast to Wh-movement, the scrambled object might not trigger a filler-gap dependency, or (b) the question-answering strategy might supersede the comprehension-based strategy. We propose that eye movements in the VWP reflect a pragmatic goal-oriented viewing: when participants are required to answer a comprehension question, they may prioritize computing the answer (and visually verifying it) over verifying syntactic relationships.
Part III: Semantics and Pragmatics in Language Processing
Chapter 9: When all linguists did not go to the workshop, none of the Germans but some of the French did: The role of alternative constructions for quantifier scope. Barbara Hemforth and Lars Konieczny
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we will present crosslinguistic data on the interpretation of negation over quantifier scope in sentences like “All children did not go to the zoo.” Questionnaire data show that English as well as German speakers prefer a linear scope interpretation of the quantifier and the negation, where it is true for all children that they did not go to the zoo. French speakers, however, strongly prefer the inverse scope interpretation where some but not all children did not go to the zoo. The preference for linear scope is moreover stronger for German speakers than for English speakers. It diminishes with age for French and English, but not for German speakers. We will argue that language differences result from two constraints: the availability of a “close” alternative in the language and the topicality of a preverbal subject. An unambiguous alternative corresponding to inverse scope in the “all-not” construction can easily be achieved in English and German by fronting the negation as in “Not all children went to the zoo”. The corresponding construction is not available in standard French. A second questionnaire study shows that adding the “Not…all” sentences to the experiment, thus increasing their availability, increases the linear scope preference in English. The particularly strong preference for linear scope in German will be argued to be linked to the stronger topicality of preverbal subjects in German main clauses.
Chapter 10: Definites, domain restriction, and discourse structure in online processing. Florian Schwarz
ABSTRACT
Definite descriptions are commonly assumed to involve a uniqueness requirement, which is crucially constrained by contextual domain restriction. Theoretical proposals differ with regards to whether a variable for domain restriction should be represented in the syntax or not, and if so, whether it should be seen as contributing a property or a situation. From the perspective of actual language use and comprehension, a key question is just how contextual information is integrated for purposes of domain restriction. Two visual world eye tracking studies addressing these issues are presented. They look at participants’ eye movements as they visually inspect an array of colored shapes and listen to descriptions thereof. For example, ‘The circle is black’ is evaluated relative to a display that contains two circles in different colors and positions. This is preceded by a context sentence that helps to set up a domain that narrows the referential choice to varying degrees, e.g. by containing ‘on the top.’ Various measures are used to assess to what extent the circle that happens to be at the top is taken to be the referent of the definite description, both in real time online while the sentence unfolds and in terms of ultimate response behavior. The results suggest that people are very much sensitive to the subtle contextual clues, and in particular that the discourse status of the key prepositional phrase in the discourse context is crucial. This has implications for theoretical perspectives on domain restriction, based on their capability to incorporate the role of discourse structure.
Chapter 11: Processing coercion in Brazilian Portuguese: Grinding objects and packaging substances. Suzi Lima
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we explore the processing of mass to count and count to mass coercion in Brazilian Portuguese following Frisson and Frazier (2005). One interesting feature of Brazilian Portuguese (as opposed to other dialects of Portuguese and other Romance languages) is the productive use of bare singulars in argument position (that is, count nouns that are not preceded by a determiner as in Eu comprei livro ‘I bought book(s)’). The goal of this paper is twofold. The first goal is to explore the interpretation of bare singulars. In an online reading task, we investigated whether the grinding interpretation of bare singulars (João viu camisa rasgada no chão ‘João saw (a/some) shirt(s) torn on the floor’) is costlier than a non-grinding interpretation (João viu camisa dobrada no chão ‘João saw shirt folded on the floor’). This is predicted by rule-based lexical shifts hypotheses according to which the non-grinding interpretation is the basic interpretation and the grinding interpretation is derived from it. The second goal is to investigate whether mass nouns in count contexts (packaging) such as Eu comprei três cervejas ontem ‘I bought three beers yesterday’ are costlier than count nouns in the same syntactic environment (Eu comprei três laranjas ontem ‘I bought three oranges yesterday’). In both studies, no significant effect was found when contrasting coerced and non-coerced uses of count and mass nouns. We suggest that this provides supporting evidence in favor of lexical pragmatics approaches over lexical rule-based theories.
Chapter 12: Processing adjuncts: Construal revisited. Britta Stolterfoht, Holger Gauza, and Melanie Störzer
ABSTRACT
The current paper looks at the consequences of data from processing order variations in adjuncts for models of sentence comprehension. A model that formulates specific assumptions for the processing of facultative constituents like adjuncts (non-primary relations), is Construal (Frazier & Clifton 1995, 1996). According to Construal, adjuncts, in contrast to complements, are not immediately attached to the current phrase structure, but loosely associated with, and are interpreted within the current thematic processing domain. Our data suggest that the class of facultative constituents like adverbials is not as homogenous as might be expected by the Construal principle. We discuss our data in the light of two processing approaches, comparing Construal with the Enlightened Incrementality Conjecture (EIC; Beck & Tiemann (to appear), which explains the differing degree of incrementality in sentence processing by reference to domains of Logical Form.
Part IV: Applications and Extensions of Language Processing Research
Chapter 13: Event knowledge and verb knowledge predict sensitivity to different aspects of semantic anomalies in aphasia. Michelle Colvin, Tessa Warren, and Michael Walsh Dickey
ABSTRACT
There has been considerable debate as to whether linguistic and world knowledge are dissociable and make distinguishable contributions to language comprehension (e.g. Hagoort et al. 2004; Warren et al. 2007). To address this question, we related people with aphasia’s performance on independent tests of event knowledge and linguistic knowledge to their sensitivity to violations of selectional restrictions and possibility in a self-paced reading task, using materials from Warren et al. (2015). Results suggested that better performance on a task designed to index verb argument structure knowledge predicted increased sensitivity to selectional restriction violations, whereas better performance on a task designed to index event knowledge predicted increased sensitivity to possibility violations. Consistent with previous findings, this pattern provides evidence that behavioral responses to violations of linguistic and event knowledge may diverge. The relationships between sensitivity to violations and task performance additionally support the assumption that selectional restrictions are a feature of verb knowledge, whereas possibility is a feature of event knowledge.
Chapter 14: Who cares what who prefers? A study in judgment differences between linguists and non-linguists. Gisbert Fanselow, Jana Häussler, and Thomas Weskott
ABSTRACT
This exploratory study contributes to the discussion of possible differences in the syntactic judgments of experts and non-experts. In particular, we investigated whether experts in a narrow sense (syntacticians) and experts in a broader sense (linguists not specializing in syntax) react differently to superiority violations in embedded clauses (who wonders what who saw) in an interpretation preference task. The overall result supports syntactic models that deal with superiority violations in terms of a competition between alternative expressions of the same meaning. The effects show up clearly in the judgment patterns of experts in the narrow sense (syntacticians) only, and thus point to the existence of a judgment difference among linguists from different subfields. This can lend support to an explanation in terms of shallow vs. deep processing of complex syntactic structures.
Chapter 15: How just is justice: Ask a psycholinguist. Janet Randall
ABSTRACT
You are a member of a jury. After the trial, the judge reads you and your fellow jurors a set of instructions. One of them begins: Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon… Confused? Now imagine that your native language is not English or that you never finished high school. Or both. Our justice system depends on jurors making informed decisions to reach a verdict, so when jury instructions are too challenging, jurors not only disengage but return misinformed verdicts. Courtroom practices make jurors’ jobs even harder. Many states don’t provide copies of the instructions and some don’t permit jurors to ask questions. Can we make instructions easier for jurors, and in so doing, improve justice? In two studies, we show that jury instruction comprehension significantly improves (a) when subjects read the texts of the instructions while listening to them and (b) when the instructions are rewritten in Plain English, minimizing two linguistic factors: passive verbs and unfamiliar legal expressions, or “legalese”. Improvements were even greater for Study 2’s MTurk subjects than Study 1’s undergraduates. Since these new subjects are closer demographically to jurors, this new data provides even more evidence that current jury instructions need to be rewritten. Taken together, the studies lay the groundwork for reform, psycholinguistics providing judiciaries the evidence they need to implement change.
Chapter 16: C-command in discourse: Syntactic principles beyond the sentence and their consequences for acquisition theory. Tom Roeper
ABSTRACT
We ask these questions: Where are parsing principles applied? Could they extend beyond sentences to Discourse? Modern proposals have proposed that Discourse structure can entail typical c-command relations. This in turn allows binding between quantifiers and pronouns. We argue that if children make the strongest, most falsifiable hypotheses first, they should seek to continue to parse input in terms of previously recognized sentence structure, linked by narrative structure as Keshet proposes for sequences like: Every candidate walked to the Dean. He took his diploma and sat down where every candidate = he. Data from the DELV test indicates that children will also allow quantifiers to be co-indexed with pronouns in separate sentences, contrary to the usual assumption that quantifier-scope is sentence bound, but consistent with Keshet’s Discourse structure. For instance, in the sequence: the man saw every boy. He played the piano, many children allow this connection. We argue that it can be seen as a natural step under a constrained notion of learnability that seeks the Strictest Interfaces possible. Rizzi (1997) argues that the CP is the point of contact with Discourse. Early arguments that children adjoin new information to the Root in an unLabelled form can be extended to mean attach to the Discourse with the same domination relations that allow c-command and binding.