CUNY 2002: SPECIAL ISSUES OF THE JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH

ABSTRACTS

FIRST ISSUE

Julie C. Sedivy  ▪   Pragmatic versus form-based accounts of referential contrast: Evidence for effects of informativity expectations

Characterizing the relationship between form-based linguistic knowledge and representation of context has long been of importance in the study of on-line language processing.  Recent experimental research has shown evidence of very rapid effects of referential context in resolving local indeterminacies online.  However, there has been no consensus regarding the nature of these context effects.  The current paper summarizes recent work covering a range of phenomena for which referential contrast has been shown to influence on-line processing, including prenominal and postnominal modification, focus operators and intonational focus.  The results of the body of work suggest that referential context effects are not limited to situations in which the linguistic form of the utterance directly specifies the point of contact with context.  Rather, context effects of a pragmatic, Gricean nature appear to be possible, suggesting the relationship between linguistic form and context in rapid on-line processing can be of a very indirect nature.

 

 

Jennifer E. Arnold, Maria Fagnano & Michael K. Tanenhaus  ▪  Disfluencies signal thee, um, new information

Speakers are often disfluent, for example saying "theee uh candle" instead of "the candle". Production data show that disfluencies occur more often during references to things that are discourse-new, rather than given.  An eyetracking experiment shows that this correlation between disfluency and discourse status affects speech comprehension.  Subjects viewed scenes containing four objects, including two cohort competitors (e.g. camel, candle), and followed spoken instructions to move the objects.  The first instruction established one cohort as discourse-given; the other was discourse-new.  The second instruction was either fluent or disfluent, and referred to either the given or new cohort.  Fluent instructions led to more initial fixations on the given cohort object (replicating Dahan et al., in press).  By contrast, disfluent instructions resulted in more fixations on the new cohort.  This shows that discourse-new information can be accessible under some circumstances.  More generally, it suggests that disfluency affects core language comprehension processes.

 

 

Yuki Kamide, Christoph Scheepers & Gerry T. M. Altmann  ▪  Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: Cross-linguistic evidence from German and English

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether, how and when syntactic and semantic constraints are integrated and used to predict properties of subsequent input. Experiment 1 contrasted auditory German constructions such as, ‘The hare-nominative eats…(the cabbage-acc).’ versus ‘The hare-accusative eats…(the fox-nom).’, presented with a picture containing a hare, fox, cabbage, and distractor. We found that the probabilities of the eye movements to the cabbage and fox before the onset of NP2 were modulated by the case-marking of NP1, indicating that the case-marking (syntactic) information and verbs’ semantic constraints are integrated rapidly enough to predict the most plausible NP2 in the scene. Using English versions of the same stimuli in active/passive voice (Experiment 2), we replicated the same effect, but at a slightly earlier position in the sentence. We discuss the discrepancies in the two Germanic languages in terms of the ease of integrating information across, or within, constituents.

 

 

Jared Novick, Albert Kim & John C. Trueswell  ▪  Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: Lexical priming, parsing and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing.  By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically-based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing.  Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically-specific syntactic information, and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge – such as overlapping and distributed representations – also characterize grammatical knowledge.  Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension.  They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.

 

 

Bob McMurray, Michael K. Tanenhaus & Richard N. Aslin  ▪  Probabilistic constraint satisfaction at the lexical/phonetic interface: Evidence for gradient effects of within-category VOT on lexical access

Research in speech perception has been dominated by a search for invariant properties of the signal that correlate with lexical and sub-lexical categories.  We argue that this search for invariance has led researchers to ignore the perceptual consequences of systematic variation within such categories, and that sensitivity to this variation may provide an important source of information for integrating information over time in speech perception.  Data from a study manipulating VOT continua in words using an eye movement paradigm indicate that lexical access shows graded sensitivity to within-category variation in VOT and that this sensitivity has a duration sufficient to be useful for information integration.  These data support a model in which the perceptual system integrates information from multiple sources and from the surrounding temporal context using probabilistic cue-weighting mechanisms.

 

 

SECOND ISSUE

Patrick Sturt  ▪  A new look at the syntax-discourse interface: The use of binding principles in sentence processing

Within Generative Grammar, binding constraints on co-reference are usually defined in syntactic terms.  However, some researchers have pointed out examples in which syntactically defined binding constraints do not seem to apply, proposing instead that a complete account of linguistic co-reference needs to consider notions of discourse structure.  There have been several proposals in the literature for the division of labor between syntax and discourse in the definition of binding constraints.  In this paper we review these proposals in the context of recent work that applies on-line techniques to explore the roles of syntactic and discourse preferences in terms of the time-course with which they become active during sentence comprehension.  Some of this research suggests that (syntactic) binding principles may be momentarily applied during processing, even in cases where the final interpretation suggests otherwise.  We end the paper by considering the theoretical and methodological implications of this view.

 

 

Daniel Grodner, Edward Gibson, Vered Argaman & Maria Babyonyshev  ▪  Against repair-based reanalysis in sentence comprehension

Structural reanalysis is generally assumed to be representation-preserving, whereby the initial analysis is manipulated, or repaired, to arrive at a new structure. This paper contends that the theoretical and empirical basis for such approaches is weak. A conceptually simpler alternative is that the processor reprocesses (some portion of) the input using just those structure-building operations available in first pass parsing. This reprocessing is a necessary component of any realistic processing model. By contrast, the structural revisions required for second-pass repair are more powerful than warranted by the abilities of the first-pass parser. This paper also reviews experimental evidence for repair presented by Sturt, Pickering, & Crocker (1999). We demonstrate that the Sturt et al. findings are consistent with a reprocessing account, and present a self-paced reading experiment intended to tease apart the repair and reprocessing accounts. The results support a reprocessing interpretation of Sturt et al.’s data, rendering a repair-based explanation superfluous.

 

 

Sun-Ah Jun  ▪  Factors affecting prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences

The attachment of a relative clause (RC) has been found to differ across languages when its head noun is a complex NP. One attempt to explain the attachment differences is the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) proposed by Fodor (1998, 2002). The goal of this paper is to show how the default phrasing of a sentence (explicit prosody), defined phonologically, differs across seven languages (English, Greek, Spanish, French, Farsi, Japanese, and Korean), and how the prosodic phrasing of a sentence in each language, both default and non-default, matches the interpretation of RC attachment by individual speakers. Observed tendencies show that there is a direct relationship between the prosodic phrasing and the interpretation of RC attachment, strongly supporting the IPH. In addition, the paper discusses the status of default phrasing and the factors affecting the default phrasing, including rhythmic and syntactic factors and their interactions.

 

 

Yuki Hirose  ▪  Recycling prosodic boundaries

The present study investigates the role of prosodic structure in selecting a syntactic analysis at different stages of parsing in silent reading of Japanese relative clauses. Experiments 1 and 2 (sentence-completion questionnaires) revealed an effect of the length of the sentence-initial constituent on the resolution of a clause boundary ambiguity in Japanese. Experiment 3 (fragment-reading) showed that this length manipulation is also reflected in prosodic phrasing in speech. Its influence on ambiguity resolution is attributed to “recycling” of prosodic boundaries established during the first-pass parse. This explanation is based on the implicit prosody proposals of Bader (1998) and Fodor (1998). Experiment 4 (self-paced reading) demonstrated the immediacy of the influence on ambiguity resolution on-line. Experiment 5 (self-paced reading) found support for the additional prediction that when no boundary is available to be recycled, processing the relative clause construction is more difficult.

 

 

Youngon Choi & Reiko Mazuka  ▪  Young children's use of prosody in sentence parsing

Korean children's ability to use prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was studied using two types of ambiguity. First we examined a word-segmentation ambiguity where placement of the phrasal boundary leads to different interpretations of a sentence. Second we examined a syntactic ambiguity where the same words were differently grouped into syntactic phrases by prosodic demarcation. Children aged 3-4 years showed that they could use prosodic information to segment utterances and to derive the meaning of ambiguous sentences when the sentences only contained a word-segmentation ambiguity. However, even 5-6-year old children were not able to reliably resolve the second type of ambiguity, an ambiguity of phrasal grouping, by using prosodic information. The results demonstrate that children's difficulties in dealing with structural ambiguity are not due to their inability to use prosodic information.

 

 

John Hale  ▪  The information conveyed by words in sentences

A method is presented for calculating the amount of information conveyed to a hearer by a speaker emitting a sentence generated by a probabilistic grammar known to both parties.  The method applies the work of Grenander (1967) to the intermediate states of a top-down parser.  This allows the uncertainty about structural ambiguity to be calculated at each point in a sentence.  Word-by-word information conveyed is calculated for several small probabilistic grammars and it is suggeste4d that the number of bits conveyed per word is a determinant of reading times and other measures of cognitive load.

 

 


Guest Editor for special JPR issues: Eva Fernández (Queens College & Graduate Center, CUNY)
Consulting JPR Editor: David A. Swinney (University of California, San Diego)

Editorial Review Committee: Gerry Altmann, Dianne Bradley, Janet Dean Fodor, Yuki Kamide, Wayne Murray, Irina Sekerina, Patrick Sturt, Michael Tanenhaus, Jennifer Venditti


Address for CUNY 2002 correspondence: sentproc@gc.cuny.edu.
Address for CUNY 2003 correspondence: cuny@tedlab.mit.edu.

Page updated 08/19/02 .  Please contact us if you experience technical problems with these web pages.