Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences.

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition. (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)     

Retrieval from temporally organized situation models

Time is an important part of establishing situations in the world. As such, temporal information should be reflected in the organization of information into situation models. This article reports 3 experiments that explore whether people will integrate sets of related facts into situation models in a time-based fashion. People memorized lists of facts and then took a speeded recognition test. A retrieval interference methodology was used to assess whether they had integrated the facts into situation models. The presence of interference indicated a lack of integration. In contrast, a marked reduction or an absence in interference indicated integration. In 2 experiments, time-based integration was observed when common time periods were referred to by either events (e.g., "when the camera flashed") or verb tense (i.e., past, present, and future). A 3rd experiment demonstrated that common time periods alone are not sufficient; the information must be allowed to occur potentially within the same situation.     

A constraint-based lexicalist account of the subject/object attachment preference

When a noun phrase could either be the object of the preceding verb or the subject of a new clause or a sentence complement, readers and listeners show a strong preference to parse the noun phrase as the object of the verb. This can result in clear garden paths for sentences such as The student read the book was stolen and While the student read the book was stolen. Even when the verb does not permit a noun phrase complement, some processing difficulty is still found. This has led some theorists to propose models in which initial attachments are lexically blind, with lexical information subsequently used as a filter to evaluate and revise initial analyses. In contrast, we show that these results emerge naturally from constraint-based lexicalist models. We present a modeling experiment with a simple recurrent network that was trained to predict upcoming complements for a sample of verbs taken from the Penn Treebank corpus. The model exhibits an object bias and it also shows effects of verb frequency which are similar to those found in the psycholinguistic literature.     

Processing arguments and adjuncts in isolation and context: The case of by-phrase ambiguities in passives.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined processing of sentences like The shrubs were planted by the apprentice/greenhouse that morning, where the by phrase is locally ambiguous between an agent and a location. Experiment 1 found a preference to initially interpret the by phrase agentively in the absence of context. In Experiment 2, a context like The head gardener decided [who should]/[where to] plant the shrubs induced an expectation that either an agent or a location would subsequently be specified. After agentive contexts, locatives were harder to process than agentives. After locative contexts, both sentences were easy to process. The authors argue that the verb and interrogative words (who, where) activate thematic roles, which can be associated with corresponding phrases. Phrases that express activated roles are easy to process. Phrases that might express activated roles but are subsequently shown not to express those roles require reanalysis. (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)     

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-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)     

Reading processes during syntactic analysis and reanalysis.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine the processing of garden path sentences such as While the boy scratched the dog yawned loudly. The ambiguous phrase of such sentences was varied, and the task of the 64 undergraduates was to read each sentence while their eye movements were monitored and then judge whether the sentence was grammatical. Early closure sentences were judged grammatical less often than were late closure sentences. Sentences with a long ambiguous phrase were judged grammatical less often than were those with a short ambiguous phrase. Reading times were shorter for sentences with a long ambiguous phrase. The latter finding reflects Ss' tendency to read more quickly as they proceed through a sentence. (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.     

Typographical cues that facilitate comprehension: Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by Lawrence T. Frase and Barry J. Schwartz (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1979[Apr], Vol 71[2], pp. 197-206). On page 203, a sentence transposed two letters in an abbreviation. The corrected sentence is published here. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1979-27787-001.) Written sentences often contain several meaningful components (e.g., causes and effects or events in a sequence). Preliminary studies of technical documents showed that typographically segmenting these components improved raters' judgments of the comprehensibility of the information. In the present paper, this segmentation notion is generalized, suggesting that phrase segmentation and indentation can be used to facilitate comprehension. Five experiments were conducted (with a total of 72 college students or technical aides) in which Ss verified sentences by reading complex information in several technical passages. Meaningfully segmented and indented text resulted in 14-28% faster response times than standard text. Both segmenting and indenting significantly influenced performance; however, once a text had been meaningfully segmented, the addition of indentation cues did not significantly affect response time. These data shed light on persisting issues in typographic design, namely, whether there is an optimal length for lines and whether justified margins are desirable. Such factors appear to be of minor cognitive relevance. The critical variable is whether the format results in a display of easily encoded units, regardless of length or neatness of margins. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension.

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Context and spoken word recognition in a novel lexicon": Correction.

Reports an error in "Context and spoken word recognition in a novel lexicon" by Kathleen Pirog Revill, Michael K. Tanenhaus and Richard N. Aslin (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008[Sep], Vol 34[5], 1207-1223). Figure 9 was inadvertently duplicated as Figure 10. Figure 9 in the original article was correct. The correct Figure 10 is provided. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-11850-014.) Three eye movement studies with novel lexicons investigated the role of semantic context in spoken word recognition, contrasting 3 models: restrictive access, access-selection, and continuous integration. Actions directed at novel shapes caused changes in motion (e.g., looming, spinning) or state (e.g., color, texture). Across the experiments, novel names for the actions and the shapes varied in frequency, cohort density, and whether the cohorts referred to actions (Experiment 1) or shapes with action-congruent or action-incongruent affordances (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 1 demonstrated effects of frequency and cohort competition from both displayed and non-displayed competitors. In Experiment 2, a biasing context induced an increase in anticipatory eye movements to congruent referents and reduced the probability of looks to incongruent cohorts, without the delay predicted by access-selection models. In Experiment 3, context did not reduce competition from non-displayed incompatible neighbors as predicted by restrictive access models. The authors conclude that the results are most consistent with continuous integration models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

This cat has nine lives? Children's memory for genericity in language.

Generic noun phrases ("Birds lay eggs") are important for expressing knowledge about abstract kinds. The authors hypothesized that genericity would be part of gist memory, such that young children would appropriately recall whether sentences were presented as generic or specific. In 4 experiments, preschoolers and college students (N = 280) heard a series of sentences in either generic form (e.g., "Bears climb trees") or specific form (e.g., "This bear climbs trees") and were asked to recall the sentences following a 4-min distractor task. Participants in all age groups correctly distinguished between generic and specific noun phrases (NPs) in their recall, even when forgetting the details of the NP form. Memory for predicate content (e.g., "climb trees") was largely unaffected by genericity, although memory for category labels (e.g., "bear") was at times better for those who heard sentences with generic wording. Overall, these results suggest that generic form is maintained in long-term memory even for young children and thus may serve as the foundation for constructing knowledge about kinds. (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 role of syntactic obligatoriness in the production of intonational boundaries.

Researchers have hypothesized that words that are highly related semantically are more likely to occur within the same intonational phrase (F. zzaq;, 1988; E. O. Selkirk, 1984). D. Watson and E. Gibson (2004) proposed that semantic closeness can be captured by using the argument/adjunct distinction, such that intonational boundaries are more likely to occur before adjuncts than before arguments. In the current experiment, the authors compared two aspects of argumenthood: semantic relatedness and obligatoriness. In a production study, speakers were more likely to place an intonational phrase boundary between a word and a dependent if the dependent was optional (e.g., after "investigation" in "The reporter's investigation [of the crash] unnerved the officials") than if the dependent was obligatory (e.g., after "investigated" in "The reporter investigated [the crash], and this unnerved the officials"). These data suggest that obligatoriness is a better predictor of intonational boundary placement than semantic closeness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb aspect and the activation of event knowledge.

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream. (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)     

Priming Prepositional-Phrase Attachment During Comprehension.

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After reading a prime expression with a high-attached interpretation, participants tended to interpret an ambiguous prepositional phrase in a target expression as highly attached if it contained the same verb as the prime (Experiment 1), but not if it contained a different verb (Experiment 2). They also tended to adopt the high-attached interpretation after producing a prime with the high-attached interpretation that included the same verb (Experiment 3). Finally, they were faster to adopt a high-attached interpretation after reading an expression containing the same verb that was disambiguated to the high-attached versus the low-attached interpretation (Experiment 4). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in activation levels with negation.

Three experiments investigated the effects of negation during on-line language processing. It was hypothesized that negation of a noun (e.g., no bread) would affect the activation level of the mental representation of that noun. Experiment 1 manipulated the location of the negation in sentences that were followed by a probe recognition task. Subjects were slower to indicate that a probe had been in the sentence when the probe corresponded to a negated noun. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a probe naming task. Experiment 3 replicated the result that reading the phrase no bread inhibits responses to bread in the probe task but found no evidence of inhibition of the response to an associate probe, such as butter. The results of these three studies suggest that negation affects the discourse focus of a noun phrase, and hence the activation level of its representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)