Critical Verb Research Articles

Eyes do not lie but words do

Abstract Evidentiality encodes how a speaker has access to the information contained in his/her proposition. It has been shown that some ‘evidential language’ speakers make a deliberate choice of evidentials while telling lies (Aikhenvald 2004). In this study, we recruited 40 native speakers of Turkish, an ‘evidential language’, to judge statements with evidentials using an eye-movement-monitoring-during-reading study with an end-of-sentence deception detection task. The participants read sentences with four conditions, containing a direct or indirect evidential form either compatible or incompatible with the given information source. Our results show that the indirect evidential condition was detected as a lie more often than the direct evidential condition. Readers had the tendency to judge stimulus material with source-evidentiality mismatch to be untruthful. These findings were mirrored in the eye-movement data, as we found gaze duration to be longer at the critical verb region for indirect evidential and mismatch conditions.

Morphosyntactic prediction in automatic neural processing of spoken language: EEG evidence

Automatic parsing of syntactic information by the human brain is a well-established phenomenon, but its mechanisms remain poorly understood. Its best-known neurophysiological reflection is the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN) component of event-related potentials (ERPs), with two alternative hypotheses for its origin: (1) error detection, or (2) morphosyntactic prediction/priming. To test these alternatives, we conducted two experiments using a non-attend passive design with visual distraction and recorded ERPs to spoken pronoun-verb phrases with/without agreement violations and to the same critical verbs presented in isolation without preceding pronouns. The results revealed an ELAN at ∼130-220 ms for pronoun-verb gender agreement violations, confirming a high degree of automaticity in early morphosyntactic parsing. Critically, the strongest ELAN was elicited by verbs outside phrasal context, which suggests that the typical ELAN pattern is underpinned by a reduction of ERP amplitudes for felicitous combinations, reflecting syntactic priming/predictability between related words/morphemes (potentially mediated by associative links formed during previous linguistic experience) rather than specialised error-detection processes.

Agreement attraction in comprehension: do active dependencies and distractor position play a role?

ABSTRACT Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of activation, and whether such decay is affected by maintenance of features in memory.

Evidence for two stages of prediction in non-native speakers: A visual-world eye-tracking study

AbstractComprehenders predict what a speaker is likely to say when listening to non-native (L2) and native (L1) utterances. But what are the characteristics of L2 prediction, and how does it relate to L1 prediction? We addressed this question in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, which tested when L2 English comprehenders integrated perspective into their predictions. Male and female participants listened to male and female speakers producing sentences (e.g.,I would like to wear the nice…) about stereotypically masculine (target: tie; distractor: drill) and feminine (target: dress; distractor: hairdryer) objects. Participants predicted associatively, fixating objects semantically associated with critical verbs (here, the tie and the dress). They also predicted stereotypically consistent objects (e.g., the tie rather than the dress, given the male speaker). Consistent predictions were made later than associative predictions, and were delayed for L2 speakers relative to L1 speakers. These findings suggest prediction involves both automatic and non-automatic stages.

Tracking Object-State Representations During Real-Time Language Comprehension by Native and Non-native Speakers of English.

The present “visual world” eye-tracking study examined the time-course of how native and non-native speakers keep track of implied object-state representations during real-time language processing. Fifty-two native speakers of English and 46 non-native speakers with advanced English proficiency joined this study. They heard short stories describing a target object (e.g., an onion) either having undergone a substantial change-of-state (e.g., chop the onion) or a minimal change-of-state (e.g., weigh the onion) while their eye movements toward competing object-states (e.g., a chopped onion vs. an intact onion) and two unrelated distractors were tracked. We found that both groups successfully directed their visual attention toward the end-state of the target object that was implied in the linguistic context. However, neither group showed anticipatory eye movements toward the implied object-state when hearing the critical verb (e.g., “weigh/chop”). Only native English speakers but not non-native speakers showed a bias in visual attention during the determiner (“the”) before the noun (e.g., “onion”). Our results suggested that although native and non-native speakers of English largely overlapped in their time-courses of keeping track of object-state representations during real-time language comprehension, non-native speakers showed a short delay in updating the implied object-state representations.

Reporting Verbs and Related Syntactic Choices in Students' Theses: A Study of Two Disciplines

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and commented on. Besides determining the most frequent communicative functions, in this paper, the RVs are further analysed in terms of the verb tense, voice, and subject-agent. The findings revealed significant differences between the two disciplines. In the former, most RVs were in the present active with named-author as the subject, conveying a neutral attitude towards the reported message and neutrally summarising previous research outcomes. Most RVs were in the past tense in the latter, reporting on past research procedures or outcomes. The findings reveal infrequent use of evaluative or critical verbs. Each discipline's predominant choice may suggest writers' lower ability to highlight the cited sources' direct relevance to their research. The study hopes to contribute to the efficacy of teaching English for Academic Purposes to non-native speakers. It has pedagogical implications for academic writing in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at non-philological tertiary education institutions.

Revisiting anti-locality effects: Evidence against prediction-based accounts

Anti-locality effects in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages are characterised by a facilitation at the clause-final verb when the distance between the verb and its prior dependents is increased. These effects are understood to be driven by a robust prediction mechanism. In this work, we revisit this rationale by replicating key anti-locality experiments for Hindi. Through a series of sentence completion studies we demonstrate that neither are clause final verbal predictions always robust, nor do these predictions necessarily improve with increased distance. Despite the evidence from sentence completion studies, the self-paced reading studies reported in this work show a facilitation at the critical verb with increase in the noun–verb distance compared to when this distance was short. We suggest that the observed effects arise due to the formation of a shallow sentential representation where the required syntactic dependencies are not formed. In other words, the facilitatory effect is not driven by a robust prediction mechanism. This proposal is additionally supported by a lack of high comprehension accuracy in multiple experiments. Additionally, our work shows that robust verbal predictions are successfully made and these predictions are successfully maintained in structures involving fewer clausal embeddings, and simple verb argument structure. This suggests that when preverbal complexity increases prediction suffers. Together the results demonstrate the overarching influence of working-memory constraints on verbal prediction in an SOV language like Hindi.

Electrophysiological evidence for the interaction of prosody and thematic fit during sentence comprehension

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the interaction of prosody and thematic fit/plausibility information during the processing of sentences containing temporary early closure (correct) or late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguities using event-related potentials (ERPs). Early closure sentences with congruent and incongruent prosody were presented where the temporarily ambiguous NP was either a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g. “While the band played the song/beer pleased all the customers.”). N400 and P600 components were examined at critical points in each condition. The CPS was examined in sentences with congruent prosody. Prosodic and thematic fit cues interacted immediately (N400–P600) at the implausible NP (beer), when it was paired with incongruent prosody. Incongruent prosody paired with a plausible NP (song) resulted in garden-path effects (N400–P600) at the critical verb (pleased). These findings provide strong evidence that prosodic and thematic fit/plausibility cues interact to aid the parser in syntactic structure building.

Electrophysiology of prosodic and lexical-semantic processing during sentence comprehension in aphasia

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine how individuals with aphasia and a group of age-matched controls use prosody and themattic fit information in sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Two groups of individuals with aphasia were investigated; those demonstrating relatively good sentence comprehension whose primary language difficulty is anomia (Individuals with Anomic Aphasia (IWAA)), and those who demonstrate impaired sentence comprehension whose primary diagnosis is Broca's aphasia (Individuals with Broca's Aphasia (IWBA)). The stimuli had early closure syntactic structure and contained a temporary early closure (correct)/late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguity. The prosody was manipulated to either be congruent or incongruent, and the temporarily ambiguous NP was also manipulated to either be a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g., "While the band played the song/the beer pleased all the customers."). It was hypothesized that an implausible NP in sentences with incongruent prosody may provide the parser with a plausibility cue that could be used to predict syntactic structure. The results revealed that incongruent prosody paired with a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 complex at the implausible NP (the beer) in both the controls and the IWAAs, yet incongruent prosody without a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 at the critical verb (pleased) only in healthy controls. IWBAs did not show evidence of N400 or P600 effects at the ambiguous NP or critical verb, although they did show evidence of a delayed N400 effect at the sentence-final word in sentences with incongruent prosody. These results suggest that IWAAs have difficulty integrating prosodic cues with underlying syntactic structure when lexical-semantic information is not available to aid their parse. IWBAs have difficulty integrating both prosodic and lexical-semantic cues with syntactic structure, likely due to a processing delay.

Do non-native languages have an effect on word order processing in first language Turkish?

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: Existing studies on sentence processing in bi-/multilinguals are typically centred on the first language (L1) influence on second language sentence processing. However, there is almost no evidence of influence in the other direction. The aim of this study is to find out whether being mono-, bi-, tri- or plurilingual has an effect on reading times (RTs) in the native language. To this end, Turkish native speakers’ RTs are measured when processing Turkish canonical subject–object–verb sentences, subject–verb–object (SVO) sentences where constituents move to post-verbal positions and SVO– ki sentences where post-verbal constituents are base generated. Design/Methodology/Approach: A non-cumulative self-paced reading task is used in order to measure the RTs of a sentence. The area of interest contains (i) the critical verb, (ii) the verb of the complement clause and (iii) the argument or adjunct of the complement clause (32 sentences + 12 filler sentences). All elements are matched according to their frequency of occurrence and their syllable structure. Data and Analysis: Analyses of variance are performed on RTs of the area of interest. Findings/Conclusions: One of the main findings in this study is that all three sentence types are processed significantly slower by the monolingual group than by the bi- and multilingual groups. We infer that non-native languages have a positive effect on processing the word order in the L1, which might lead to a faster processing in the three sentence types. The findings are discussed in terms of working memory and the “gap-driven strategy”. Originality and Significance/Implications: The results are interpreted from psycholinguistic and syntactic points of view.

What makes syntactic processing of subject–verb agreement complex? The effects of distance and additional agreement features

This study investigates two types of factors potentially affecting the level of complexity of processing subject–verb agreement: (i) distance between the subject and the critical verb (0, 1 or 2 constituents) and (ii) type of intervening constituent between the subject and the verb (adverb versus an NP within a PP). NPs, but not adverbs, include additional number features that potentially increase complexity of processing the agreement relationship between the number features of the subject NP and the verb. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured to investigate the neural correlates of agreement processing. Eighteen native Spanish speaking participants read grammatical sentences as well as ungrammatical sentences violating subject–verb agreement. The ungrammatical sentences elicited posterior negativities in the 350–500 ms time window. No effects of distance or type of constituents were found in this time window. A typical P600 effect was also observed in response to the agreement violations. The linear distance between the subject and the verb influenced the P600 effect; the sentences containing two constituents elicited more positive going waveforms compared to sentences without intervening constituents. The type of constituent did not play a role. The results fit psycholinguistic accounts assuming that integration of additional linguistic elements makes it more complex to process the subject–verb agreement relationship at the verb, regardless of the presence of additional number features.

Eye-tracking and corpus-based analyses of syntax-semantics interactions in complement coercion

ABSTRACTPrevious work has shown that the difficulty associated with processing complex semantic expressions is reduced when the critical constituents appear in separate clauses as opposed to when they appear together in the same clause. We investigated this effect further, focusing in particular on complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb (e.g. began) combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g. began the memo). Experiment 1 compared reading times for coercion versus control expressions when the critical verb and complement appeared together in a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) (e.g. The secretary that began/wrote the memo) compared to when they appeared together in a simple sentence. Readers spent more time processing coercion expressions than control expressions, replicating the typical coercion cost. In addition, readers spent less time processing the verb and complement in SRCs than in simple sentences; however, the magnitude of the coercion cost did not depend on sentence structure. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that the coercion cost was reduced when the complement appeared as the head of an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) (e.g. The memo that the secretary began/wrote) compared to when the constituents appeared together in an SRC. Consistent with the eye-tracking results of Experiment 2, a corpus analysis showed that expressions requiring complement coercion are more frequent when the constituents are separated by the clause boundary of an ORC compared to when they are embedded together within an SRC. The results provide important information about the types of structural configurations that contribute to reduced difficulty with complex semantic expressions, as well as how these processing patterns are reflected in naturally occurring language.

Representation of Polysemy in Mandarin Verbs: Chī, Dǎ, and Xǐ

This paper reports the findings from a semantic judgment priming task aimed at examining how senses of three semantically complex Mandarin verbs chī ‘eat’, dǎ ‘hit’, and xǐ ‘wash’ are stored in the mental lexicon. In the experiment, the prime stimuli belonged to the basic senses of the three critical polysemous verbs. Three target conditions, that is, verb phrases with the same basic senses (e.g. chī niupai ‘to eat steak’), closely related senses (e.g. chī wěiya ‘to attend a year-end party’), and distantly related senses (e.g. chī lǎoběn ‘to live on one’s own fat’), were prepared to test whether processing patterns varied for different types of extended senses within a polysemous verb. The results indicate linearly decreasing priming effects for senses moving from the core senses, through closely related senses, to distantly related senses. These effects conflict with the separate-entry view and provide evidence for a shared core representation among polysemous senses.

Semantic Processing Persists despite Anomalous Syntactic Category: ERP Evidence from Chinese Passive Sentences.

The syntax-first model and the parallel/interactive models make different predictions regarding whether syntactic category processing has a temporal and functional primacy over semantic processing. To further resolve this issue, an event-related potential experiment was conducted on 24 Chinese speakers reading Chinese passive sentences with the passive marker BEI (NP1 + BEI + NP2 + Verb). This construction was selected because it is the most-commonly used Chinese passive and very much resembles German passives, upon which the syntax-first hypothesis was primarily based. We manipulated semantic consistency (consistent vs. inconsistent) and syntactic category (noun vs. verb) of the critical verb, yielding four conditions: CORRECT (correct sentences), SEMANTIC (semantic anomaly), SYNTACTIC (syntactic category anomaly), and COMBINED (combined anomalies). Results showed both N400 and P600 effects for sentences with semantic anomaly, with syntactic category anomaly, or with combined anomalies. Converging with recent findings of Chinese ERP studies on various constructions, our study provides further evidence that syntactic category processing does not precede semantic processing in reading Chinese.

P600 Dominance Predicts Comprehension of Garden-Path Sentences

P600 Dominance Predicts Comprehension of Garden-Path Sentences

Hyper-active gap filling.

Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information.

Priming of early closure: evidence for the lexical boost during sentence comprehension

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated priming in sentences containing ‘early’ vs. ‘late closure’ ambiguities. Early closure sentences impose relatively large processing costs at the point of syntactic disambiguation. The current study investigated a possible way to reduce processing costs. Target sentences were temporarily ambiguous and were disambiguated towards either the preferred ‘late’ closure analysis or the dispreferred ‘early’ closure analysis. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime that was either structurally identical or that required a different syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, all the prime sentences shared the same critical verb as the target. In Experiment 2, verb repetition was eliminated by reorganising the stimuli from Experiment 1. In Experiment 1, processing of the disambiguating verb was facilitated when an ‘early’ closure target sentence followed an ‘early’ closure prime. In Experiment 2, there were no significant priming effects, although an overall difference in processing time favoured ‘late closure’ targets. Combined analyses verified that the pattern of results in Experiment 1 differed significantly from Experiment 2. These experiments provide the first indication that ‘early’ closure analyses can be primed and that such priming is more robust when a critical verb appears in both the prime and the target sentence. The results add to the body of data indicating a ‘lexical boost’ for syntactic priming effects during comprehension. They have implications for theories of syntactic representation and processing.

The difference between "giving a rose" and "giving a kiss": Sustained neural activity to the light verb construction.

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with processing light verb constructions such as "give a kiss". These constructions consist of a semantically underspecified light verb ("give") and an event nominal that contributes most of the meaning and also activates an argument structure of its own ("kiss"). This creates a mismatch between the syntactic constituents and the semantic roles of a sentence. Native speakers read German verb-final sentences that contained light verb constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a kiss"), non-light constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a rose"), and semantically anomalous constructions (e.g., *"Julius gave Anne a conversation"). ERPs were measured at the critical verb, which appeared after all its arguments. Compared to non-light constructions, the light verb constructions evoked a widely distributed, frontally focused, sustained negative-going effect between 500 and 900 ms after verb onset. We interpret this effect as reflecting working memory costs associated with complex semantic processes that establish a shared argument structure in the light verb constructions.

Revisiting the scrambling complexity hypothesis in sentence processing: a self-paced reading study on anomaly detection and scrambling in Hindi

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.

Priming in sentence comprehension: Strategic or syntactic?

Two eye-tracking experiments and two self-paced reading experiments investigated processing of sentences containing reduced relative clauses. Processing of a reduced relative is facilitated when it is preceded by a sentence that has the same syntactic structure, as long as the preceding sentence contains the same critical verb as the target (LeDoux, Traxler, & Swaab, 2007; Pickering & Traxler, 2004; Traxler & Pickering, 2005). This study tests whether facilitative effects result from readers using the prime sentence as a strategic cue to predict an upcoming reduced relative target. This hypothesis was tested in three ways. In the first experiment, properties of the filler items were manipulated to reduce or eliminate the strategic value of repeated verbs as a structural cue. In the second experiment, noun overlap, rather than verb overlap, created a valid strategic cue to the upcoming sentence structure. In the third experiment, readers were warned that a reduced relative sentence would be forthcoming. Significant priming occurred in the absence of a valid cue in the first experiment; and no structural priming occurred in the presence of a valid cue in the second and third experiments. The fourth experiment demonstrated that the self-paced reading method is sensitive to priming effects. These results are consistent with previous studies showing the same dissociation between strategic cues and priming effects and therefore further indicate that priming effects are the result of a set of processes intrinsic to the parser.