A Prosodic Focus Study on the Differentiation of Syntactic Structural Ambiguity from the Perspective of Experimental Phonetics: A Case Study of The Mother of Three Children

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

The On-Line Resolution of the Sentence Complement/Relative Clause Ambiguity: Evidence from Spanish

This paper investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the process of sentence comprehension, with a specific focus on the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic information to the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. We argue that prosodic structure provides an initial memory representation for spoken sentences, and that information from this prosodic representation is available to inform syntactic parsing decisions. This view makes three predictions for the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity: 1. When prosodic and syntactic boundaries coincide, syntactic processing should be facilitated. 2. When prosodic boundaries are placed at misleading points in syntactic structure, syntactic processing should show interference effects. 3. The processing difficulties that have been reliably demonstrated in reading experiments for syntactically complex sentences should disappear when those sentences are presented with a felicitous prosodic structure in listening experiments. These predictions were confirmed by series of experiments measuring end-of-sentence comprehension time and cross-modal naming time for sentences with temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Sentences with coinciding or conflicting prosodic and syntactic boundaries were compared to a prosodic baseline condition.

Introduction: The building of semantic and syntactic representations during sentence processing can be influenced by probabilistic cues such as context, plausibility, and prosody (Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers & Lotocky, 1997; Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999). Consider the following: 1. While the band played the song pleased all the customers. This sentence contains a temporary direct object (DO)/sentential complement (SC) syntactic ambiguity because the verb “played” is an optionally transitive verb so the listener does not initially know whether the NP “the song” is the DO of the verb “played” or whether it is the subject of the main clause. This can be immediately disambiguated with the addition of a pause after the verb “played” signaling the presence of a syntactic boundary. Lexical-semantic information may also interact with syntax during sentence processing. For example, several studies have found that healthy controls are sensitive to verb transitivity and thematic fit plausibility (Mitchell, 1987; van Gompel & Pickering, 2001) such that processing is momentarily disrupted when a verb is followed by an implausible NP. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we aim to examine how persons with aphasia (PWA) use prosodic and lexical-semantic information. Prosody was manipulated to either facilitate (Sentence 2a & 2b) or disrupt (Sentences 2c & 2d) syntactic processing. Thematic fit conflict between the verb (e.g. “played”) and the structurally ambiguous NP (e.g. “song”/“beer”) was also manipulated. 2a. [While the band played] the song pleased all the customers. 2b. [While the band played] the beer pleased all the customers. 2c. [While the band played the song] pleased all the customers. 2d. [While the band played the beer] pleased all the customers. * [ ] Indicates prosodic contour Methods: Twenty-four healthy college-age control participants (YNCs) and ten adults with a Broca’s aphasia participated in this study. Each sentence was presented aurally to the participants over headphones. ERP Data Recording & Analysis. ERPs were recorded from 32-electrode sites across the scalp according to the 10-20 system. ERPs were averaged (100ms prestimulus baseline) from artifact free trials time-locked to critical words (i.e., the point of disambiguation “pleased” in the prosodic comparison, and the NP “the song”/”the beer” in the semantic comparison). Mean amplitudes were calculated in two windows: 300-500ms for the N400 effects and 500-1000ms for the P600 effects. Results: The data from our YNCs revealed a biphasic N400-P600 complex in the prosody comparison (Figure 1A). We also found an N400 effect immediately at the NP in the incongruent relative to congruent thematic fit comparison. For the prosodic comparison in the PWA group, a delayed N400 effect was found one word downstream relative to the YNC data in the prosody comparison (Figure 1B). Additionally, an N400 effect was observed in the thematic fit comparison. Discussion: The results suggests that PWA possess a delayed sensitivity to prosodic cues, which then may affect their ability to recover from misanalysis from an incorrect parse. The results also indicate that PWA are sensitive to thematic fit information and have the capacity to process this information similarly to YNCs.

The purpose of the study is to investigate Taiwanese EFL learners' parsing strategies while they process English (L2) sentences. The syntactic structure under investigation is relative clause attachment ambiguities in ”two-site contexts”, namely, a complex NP (NP1-of-NP2 and NP1-with-NP2) followed by a relative clause. A total of sixty freshmen at an Institute of Technology in northern Taiwan participated in the experiment. Data collected by means of a carefully designed questionnaire were analyzed by a t-test and a one-way ANOVA. Results showed that a) the EFL learners preferred to attach the relative clause high to the first NP, and b) they were not sensitive to the lexical semantic information carried by with. The findings suggested that the principle of late closure might not be universal, and during sentence comprehension learners might have drawn on other parsing principles and were under the influence of properties of L1.

Summary : Resolution of syntactic ambiguities : Evidence from cross-linguistic studies. Determining how people convert a string of words into a representation of the structure of the sentence is a central problem in sentence processing. Studying how people handle syntactic ambiguities offers much of the information needed to tackle important issues in parsing. The first section of this article presents three types of models as a function of the solutions they propose in case of syntactic ambiguity : 1/ the parser forces the decision (e.g., in favour of the simplest structure) ; 2/ the choice is postponed until more information is available ; 3/ the different structures are processed in parallel, together with other sources of information. The second section shows that these models cannot explain cross-linguistic differences observed in the resolution of syntactically ambiguous sentences. The third section presents a few new models that have been proposed to explain cross-linguistic data. This review shows how cross-linguistic findings raise major difficulties for models that have been presented so far in the literature. Key words : syntactic ambiguity, sentence comprehension, relative clause.

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.

Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared to reading time on unambiguous control sentences. Sentences either did or did not contain repeated phonemes. The results showed that reading time was longer for sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity than for unambiguous control sentences. Reading time was also longer on sentences containing repeated phonemes than on sentences that did not contain repeated phonemes. Phonemic repetition did not increase the time taken for syntactic ambiguity resolution; rather, the effects of syntactic ambiguity and phonemic repetition were temporally distinct, with the effect of phonemic repetition following the effect of syntactic ambiguity. Implications for theories of working memory are discussed.

Working memory constraints on syntactic ambiguity resolution as revealed by electrical brain responses

The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. Minimal Attachment-Frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain & Steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution process is governed not by Minimal Attachment but instead by whether or not a referring expression provides sufficient information with which to identify a unique referent. Such an approach relies on the provision of adequate contextual information, something which has been lacking in experiments which have been claimed to support Minimal Attachment. In this paper I shall consider a number of such experiments, and the different patterns of results which emerge once contextual information is provided. Although the importance of contextual information will be stressed, I shall briefly consider reasons why parsing preferences arise in the absence of any explicit prior context. The conclusion is that computational models of syntactic ambiguity resolution which are based on evidence which has ignored contextual considerations are models of something other than natural language processing.

Summary The concepts of structural vs. interpretive ambiguity were examined, and the measures of each were defined using the 45 blots of the Holtzman Inkblot Test (HIT). The ambiguity measures were taken from two distinct sets of four student samples with diverse cultural backgrounds. Structural ambiguity ratings were also made by a sample of professional psychologists. The nature and degree of relationship between the structural and interpretive ambiguity measures was determined for each of the four cultural groups, and the extent of agreement among the groups was obtained for both measures. Findings indicated that the nature of the relationship between the two measures is an inverse one, with blots rated low in structural ambiguity receiving high interpretive scores and vice versa. Results showed high agreement among the student samples, as well as with the sample of psychologists, regarding the structural measure, and substantial agreement was also found among the student samples on the interpretive me...

Resolution of syntactic category ambiguities: Eye movements in parsing lexically ambiguous sentences

In an event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the use of second language rhythmic properties during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Syntactically ambiguous sentences embedded in rhythmically regular and irregular contexts were presented to Turkish early and late second language (L2) learners of German and to German monolingual controls. Regarding rhythmic properties, Turkish is syllable-timed and prefers the iamb as its metric foot, while German is stress-timed, relying on the trochee. To utilize rhythm during the processing of syntactic ambiguity in L2, Turkish early and late L2 learners of German must master different rhythmic properties than in their first language. ERPs reveal a reduction in the P600 response to object-first sentences presented in rhythmically regular, but not in rhythmically irregular contexts for early learners and monolinguals only. No such effect was found for late L2 learners. Results indicate an interactive use of rhythmic information during the processing of syntactic ambiguity by monolinguals and early learners. Further, data from late L2 learners suggest that the acquisition of rhythmic properties may have to occur in a sensitive learning period.

Contents: C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier, K. Rayner, Introduction. Part I:Sentence Processing and the Brain. L. Osterhout, Event-Related Brain Potentials as Tools for Comprehending Language Comprehension. P. Hagoort, C. Brown, Brain Responses to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution and Parsing. Part II:Phonological Processing. P. Zwitserlood, Access to Phonological-Form Representations in Language Comprehension and Production. C.M. Connine, Vertical and Horizontal Similarity in Spoken-Word Recognition. Part III:Syntactic Processing: Information Flow and Decision Making. M.C. MacDonald, N.J. Pearlmutter, M.S. Seidenberg, Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution as Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. J.C. Trueswell, M.K. Tanenhaus, Toward a Lexicalist Framework of Constraint-Based Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution. E. Gibson, N.J. Pearlmutter, A Corpus-Based Analysis of Psycholinguistic Constraints on Prepositional-Phrase Attachment. M. Pickering, S. Barton, R. Shillcock, Unbounded Dependencies, Island Constraints, and Processing Complexity. M. Bader, I. Lasser, German Verb-Final Clauses and Sentence Processing: Evidence for Immediate Attachment. Part IV:Syntactic Processing and Computational Models. M.W. Crocker, On the Nature of the Principle-Based Sentence Processor. O. Rambow, A.K. Joshi, A Processing Model for Free Word-Order Languages. E.P. Stabler, The Finite Connectivity of Linguistic Structure. Part V:Referential Processing. S. Garrod, Resolving Pronouns and Other Anaphoric Devices: The Case for Diversity in Discourse Processing. W.S. Murray, S.P. Liversedge, Referential Context Effects on Syntactic Processing. J. Sedivy, M. Spivey-Knowlton, The Use of Structural, Lexical, and Pragmatic Information in Parsing Attachment Ambiguities. M. Spivey-Knowlton, M.K. Tanenhaus, Referential Context and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution. Part VI:Sentence Processing and Language Acquisition. S. Crain, W. Ni, L. Conway, Learning, Parsing and Modularity.