Plausibility and recovery from garden paths: An eye-tracking study.

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated plausibility effects on recovery from misanalysis in sentence comprehension. On the initially favored analysis, a noun phrase served as the object of the preceding verb. On the ultimately correct analysis, it served as the subject of a main clause in Experiments 1 and 3 and of a complement clause in Experiment 2. If the object analysis was implausible, disruption occurred during processing of the noun phrase. If it was plausible, disruption occurred after disambiguation. In Experiment 3, discourse context affected plausibility of the initial analysis and subsequent reanalysis. The authors argue that readers performed substantial semantic processing on the initial analysis and committed strongly when it was plausible. Experiment 3 showed that these effects were not due to selectional restrictions or word co-occurrences and that the interpretation of the target sentence was not computed in isolation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was…") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentence-complement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Complement coercion is not modulated by competition: Evidence from eye movements.

An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g., the book) appears as the complement of an event-selecting verb (e.g., began the book). Previous studies demonstrated that these expressions are more costly to process than are control expressions that can be processed with basic compositional operations (L. Pylkkanen & B. McElree, 2006). Complement coercion is thought to be costly because comprehenders need to construct an event sense of the complement to satisfy the semantic restrictions of the verb (e.g., began writing the book). The reported experiment tests the alternative hypotheses that the cost arises from the need to select 1 interpretation from several or from competition between alternative interpretations. Expressions with weakly constrained interpretations (no dominant interpretation and several alternative interpretations) were not more costly to process than expressions with a strongly constrained interpretation (1 dominant interpretation and few alternative interpretations). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the cost reflects the on-line construction of an event sense for the complement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all.

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word integration and regression programming during reading: A test of the E-Z reader 10 model.

Participants read sentences with two types of target nouns, one that did and one that did not require a determiner to form a legal verb–noun phrase sequence. Sentences were presented with and without the critical determiner to create a local noun integration difficulty when a required determiner was missing. The absence of a required determiner did not influence 1st-pass reading of the verb, the noun, and the posttarget word. It did, however, have a profound effect on 2nd-pass reading. All three words were a likely target of a regression when a required determiner was missing, and the noun and the posttarget word were likely sources of a regression. These results are consistent with novel E-Z reader model assumptions, according to which identification of the noun should be followed by its integration, and integration difficulties can lead to the initiation of a regression to the noun. However, integration difficulties influenced eye movements earlier and later than predicted by the new model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thematic roles in sentence parsing.

Two eyetracking experiments examined the interaction among syntactic parsing preferences, thematically based comprehension preferences, and plausibility in the early stages of reading a sentence. Results from 64 adults support the pattern of results reported by L. Stowe (1989) when looking at the disambiguating region of a sentence. However, the results for earlier regions suggest that the postverbal noun phrase was initially taken as direct object of an ergative verb even when the subject was inanimate. It appears that the inanimacy of the subject may not have guided the initial syntactic analysis, but rather facilitated the revision of an initial misanalysis. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The high-pathogenicity island of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis can be inserted into any of the three chromosomal asn tRNA genes

In two experiments, we investigated how reading time was affected by the plausibility of the prepositional phrase in subject-verb-noun-phrase-prepositional-phrase sentences, and the status of the prepositional phrase as argument versus adjunct of the verb. Highly plausible prepositional phrases were read faster than less plausible ones, and argument prepositional phrases were read faster than adjuncts. These effects appeared both in a self-paced reading experiment and in an experiment that measured eye movements during normal reading. The effects of plausibility were substantially larger and longer lasting than the effects of argument status, but both appeared very early in the reading of the prepositional phrase. The implications of these effects for models of parsing and sentence interpretation are discussed.     

Continuous Mapping From Sound to Meaning in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Immediate Effects of Verb-Based Thematic Constraints.

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scope of lexical access in spoken sentence production: Implications for the conceptual–syntactic interface.

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the 2 pictures used to elicit a sentence initial coordinated noun phrase (Experiment 1). When the same displays are used to elicit an alternative Japanese listing structure, onset latencies are speeded only by the preview of the first picture to be named (Experiment 2). The findings of Experiment 1 were therefore not the result of stimulus design. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 in English. Experiments 4 and 5 tested a subject phrase consisting of a noun phrase modified by a prepositional phrase in English and Japanese. In both languages, only preview of the first picture to be named speeds responses, irrespective of whether it occurs in the head phrase (English) or not (Japanese). These results suggest that prior to utterance onset, only access to the nouns for the first phrase to be produced is required, even if this is not the head phrase. The implications for speech production models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Situation models and abstract ownership relations.

Six experiments used a fan-effect paradigm to test whether people can use the abstract relation of ownership to help integrate information into situation models. People studied sentences of the form The [person] owns/is buying the [object] for a later recognition test. The integration of sentences into a situation model (as evidenced by an attenuated or absent fan effect) was observed when the verb phrase referred to a specific event (is buying) and the objects could all be bought in the same place (e.g., a drugstore). This organization did not occur either when the verb phrase referred to general ownership (owns) or when the items were unlikely to be purchased in a single location (e.g., television and car). It was concluded that although abstract relations can be used to segregate information into sets that can be integrated into situation models, this integration is more likely when it can be embedded within a spatial-temporal framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An investigation of late closure: The role of syntax, thematic structure, and pragmatics in initial interpretation.

Four reading-time experiments investigated the application of the late closure principle in Italian. The experiments tested the principle governing the initial attachment of different types of modifiers (relative clause, adjectival phrase, and prepositional phrase) to a complex noun phrase. By manipulating the type of preposition within the complex noun phrase, the authors investigated the role of the thematic structure in initial and final parsing. The results show that the late closure principle applies to initial parsing in Italian without being affected by the thematic structure of the complex noun phrase. Final interpretation, however, shows an effect of pragmatic preference and an effect of thematic structure on syntactic revisions. The results are discussed in terms of a parsing model that adopts syntactic parsing strategies and makes modular use of linguistic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in the recognition and recall of sentences.

Examined the role of verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in determining sentence imagery and memory in 2 experiments with a total of 111 male and 17 female university students. Semantic changes in sentences were recognized more often if the noun phrases were concrete rather than abstract. Free recall of sentences was affected similarly by phrase concreteness. Verb imagery, however, had no effect on either recognition or recall performance. Analysis of recall by type of word indicated that organization of recall centered upon the nouns. Implications of these results for the hypothesis of imaginal coding of concrete sentence meaning are discussed. (French summary) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb retrieval and sentence production in aphasia

This paper presents a subject with a selective verb retrieval deficit. Nouns were produced more successfully than verbs in spontaneous speech, picture naming and when naming to definition. The word class effect was not observed in comprehension tasks, reading aloud or writing. This indicated that it was due to a specific problem in accessing verbs' phonological representations from semantics. The second part of the paper explores the implications of the verb deficit for sentence production. Analyses of narrative speech revealed a typically agrammatic profile, with minimal verb argument structure and few function words and inflections. Two investigations suggested that the sentence deficit was at least partly contingent upon the verb deficit. In the first, the subject was asked to produce a sentence with the aid of a provided noun or verb. The noun cues were not effective in eliciting sentences, whereas verb cues were. The second investigation explored the effects of therapy aiming to improve verb retrieval. This therapy resulted in better verb retrieval and improved sentence production with those verbs. These findings suggest that an inability to access verbs' phonological representations can severely impair sentence formulation. Implications for models of sentence production are considered.     

Lexical and message-level sentence context effects on fixation times in reading.

Readers' eye movements were recorded as they read an unambiguous noun in a sentence context. In Exp 1, fixation durations on a target noun were shorter when it was embedded in context containing a subject noun and a verb that were weakly related to the target than when either content word was replaced with a more neutral word. These results were not affected by changes in the syntactic relations between the content words. In Exp 2, the semantic relations between the message-level representation of the sentence and the target word were altered whereas the lexical content was held constant. Fixation time on the target word was shorter when the context was semantically related to the target word than when it was unrelated. Intralexical priming effects between the subject noun and the verb were also observed. Results suggest that both lexical and message-level representations can influence the access of an individual lexical item in a sentence context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A metalanguage analysis of counselor and client verb usage in counseling.

Examined the verb type and noun case role usages of a counselor and client from the 1st, 11th, and 25th interviews in a single counseling case, using the rationale from a computer-assisted language analysis system and a case grammar approach. The analysis indicated that the participants were remarkably similar in the frequency with which they used (a) specific verb types and (b) case roles of particular noun phrases within each interview. Moreover, Ss were similar in their changes to higher or lower frequencies of these units of linguistic structure over the 3 interviews. The counselor and client appear to be "tracking" each other in their use of given verb types as methods for relating named things to each other. In the beginning of the series, the majority of verbs that both participants used identified the client member of the pair as the agent of some action. By the end of the series, a majority of verbs that both participants were using identified the client as the object of some inner state, or as the experiencer of a psychological process of feeling, sensing, or knowing. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production.

Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues in early language acquisition. Alternatively, children may be sensitive to functors in perception, but omit them in production. In 3 experiments, 2-year-olds imitated sentences that contained English or non-English functors and that were controlled for both suprasegmental and segmental factors. Children omitted English functors more frequently than non-English functors, indicating perceptual sensitivity to familiar vs unfamiliar elements. The results suggest that children may be able to use functors early in language acquisition to solve the segmentation and labeling problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Continuity and the persistence of objects: when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

In three experiments, a total of 480 participants heard a version of the story of the ship of Theseus (Hobbes, 1672/1913), in which a novel object, labeled with a possessive noun phrase, underwent a transformation in which its parts were replaced one at a time. Participants then had to decide which of two objects carried the same possessive noun phrase as the original: the one made entirely of new parts (that could be inferred to be continuous with the original) or one reassembled from the original parts (that could not be inferred to be continuous with the original). Participants often selected the object made of new parts, despite the radical transformation. However, the tendency to do so was significantly stronger (1) if the object was described as an animal than if it was described as an artifact, (2) if the animal's transformation lacked a human cause than if it possessed one, and (3) if the selection was made by adults or 7-year-olds than if it was made by 5-year-olds. The findings suggest that knowledge about specific kinds of objects and their canonical transformations exerts an increasingly powerful effect, over the course of development, upon people's tendency to rely on continuity as a criterion for attributing persistence to objects that undergo change.     

In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension.

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject–verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)