Abstract
Previous psycholinguistics studies have shown that when forming a long distance dependency in online processing, the parser sometimes accepts a sentence even though the required grammatical constraints are only partially met. A mechanistic account of how such errors arise sheds light on both the underlying linguistic representations involved and the processing mechanisms that put such representations together. In the current study, we contrast the negative polarity items (NPI) interference effect, as shown by the acceptance of an ungrammatical sentence like “The bills that democratic senators have voted for will ever become law,” with the well-known phenomenon of agreement attraction (“The key to the cabinets are … ”). On the surface, these two types of errors look alike and thereby can be explained as being driven by the same source: similarity based memory interference. However, we argue that the linguistic representations involved in NPI licensing are substantially different from those of subject-verb agreement, and therefore the interference effects in each domain potentially arise from distinct sources. In particular, we show that NPI interference at least partially arises from pragmatic inferences. In a self-paced reading study with an acceptability judgment task, we showed NPI interference was modulated by participants' general pragmatic communicative skills, as quantified by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ, Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), especially in offline tasks. Participants with more autistic traits were actually less prone to the NPI interference effect than those with fewer autistic traits. This result contrasted with agreement attraction conditions, which were not influenced by individual pragmatic skill differences. We also show that different NPI licensors seem to have distinct interference profiles. We discuss two kinds of interference effects for NPI licensing: memory-retrieval based and pragmatically triggered.
Highlights
During the processing of long distance dependencies, sometimes an element in a sentence that should be irrelevant for constructing a dependency interferes—a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “interference effect.” For instance, agreement attraction errors, such as ∗the key to the cabinets are . . . , involve an agreement dependency between the singular subject the key and the plural copula verb are which is ungrammatical because of a number mismatch
Verbs without interference (Bock and Miller, 1991; Bock and Eberhard, 1993; Pearlmutter et al, 1999; Eberhard et al, 2005; Wagers et al, 2009; Dillon et al, 2013). Such interference effects have been explained as instances of memory interference triggered during cue based memory retrieval
We argue that the different interference profiles stem from the fact that negative polarity items (NPI) licensing and subject-verb agreement are different types of linguistic dependencies
Summary
During the processing of long distance dependencies, sometimes an element in a sentence that should be irrelevant for constructing a dependency interferes—a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “interference effect.” For instance, agreement attraction errors, such as ∗the key to the cabinets are . . . , involve an agreement dependency between the singular subject the key and the plural copula verb are which is ungrammatical because of a number mismatch. Facilitation effects from an interfering element have been shown by various processing measures: such sentences are relatively common in spontaneous production; they can be elicited in controlled laboratory experiments; they are judged to be relatively acceptable; and online reading times on the otherwise problematic verb are generally reduced compared to number mismatched verbs without interference (Bock and Miller, 1991; Bock and Eberhard, 1993; Pearlmutter et al, 1999; Eberhard et al, 2005; Wagers et al, 2009; Dillon et al, 2013) Such interference effects have been explained as instances of memory interference triggered during cue based memory retrieval. Memory retrieval is initiated in order to search for a plural subject at the plural verb, e.g., “were.” Because the search mechanism is content addressable (McElree et al, 2003), it may target any item in memory during the search process, leading to erroneous acceptance of interfering material which bears feature similarity to the correct retrieval target
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