Grammaticality Judgment Experiment Research Articles

Lateralization as a symphony: Joint influence of interhemispheric inhibition and transmission on brain asymmetry and syntactic processing

This study investigated the roles of cross-hemispheric communications in promoting left-lateralized syntactic processing in the brain. Fifty-six young right-handers without familial sinistrality background underwent a divided visual field ERP grammaticality judgment experiment to assess syntactic processing in each hemisphere. Two behavioral tasks —the bilateral flanker task and bilateral word matching task, were used to assess cross-hemispheric inhibition and transmission. Grand average ERP data showed a significant P600 grammaticality effect in the left hemisphere (LH) only; however, individual variations in the P600 responses were observed in both hemispheres. Results of correlational analyses showed that larger LH P600 effects were associated with slower inter-hemispheric transmissions; smaller right hemisphere (RH) P600 effects were associated with more effective RH inhibition. These results yielded support for both the callosal distance hypothesis and the inhibition hypothesis for language lateralization and demonstrated that different aspects of cross-hemispheric communications jointly influence the degree of syntactic lateralization.

Bilingual grammar: Toward an integrated model by Luis López

Reviewed by: Bilingual grammar: Toward an integrated model by Luis López Artemis Alexiadou Bilingual grammar: Toward an integrated model. By Luis López. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. viii, 229. ISBN 9781108485392. $110 (Hb). This book presents a comprehensive theory of bilingual grammar that dispenses with the notion of two lexicons, common in most work on bilingual speakers. Luis López puts forth an integrated model, in which there is a unified system of linguistic competence. The main idea of this model, which focuses on code-switching by deep bilinguals, that is, bilingual speakers who have learned their two languages from birth or very early on, is that the linguistic competence of bilingual speakers should be considered a single cognitive module. To this end, the bilingual lexicon is viewed in the realization mode that characterizes distributed morphology, and several compelling arguments against the separationist view are discussed. The book strikes a fine balance between empirical coverage and theoretical discussion and contributes greatly to our understanding and modeling of bilingual grammars. The book contains ten chapters and two appendices. In Ch. 1, L motivates the unified model. The main goal here is to present arguments against mainstream approaches to code-switching and bilingualism in general, which adopt the view that speakers have two discrete languages at their disposal—the perspective labeled 'separationist' by L. If one adopts the separationist view, one might expect the combination of a speaker's two languages to give random results. From the point of view of the integrated model, the linguistic knowledge of a speaker is rule-governed in toto (9). This behavior is reflected in grammaticality judgment experiments, which previous literature has advised against running with bilingual speakers. L continues his review of separationist architectures in Ch. 2. The focus of this chapter is MacSwan's model (MacSwan 1999, 2000), which L considers, rightly in my view, to be the most formally rigorous model of the separationist perspective. The issue with MacSwan's model, which assumes two lexicons, is that it leads to numerous empirical problems. MacSwan adopts the minimalist perspective on grammar and assumes that bilinguals have two lexicons and two PFs (phonetic forms), but one computational system. Since items from both lexicons feed the computational system, this gives rise to code-switching. L notes two empirical problems for this model. First, a common strategy adopted in code-switching is the inclusion of structures containing a light verb, typically 'do', that takes as its complement a verb in its citation form, which is the element that carries lexical meaning. The light verb and the lexical verb come from different lexicons. In the case of Spanish-German bilinguals, while the Spanish monolingual grammar has two uses for the verb hacer 'do', a causative use and the heavy use, bilingual speakers have a third use—it can function as a light verb, but one that can select only a German infinitival verb. As L argues, if there are two independent lexicons, this restriction cannot be formulated. The second case involves English-Swahili code-switching, in which English nouns bear Swahili noun class markers. The question raised is where the information about class comes from in the English lexicon. L argues that this supports the view that bilingual speakers can use nouns in two different morphosyntactic frames; see Alexiadou et al. 2015 and Alexiadou & Lohndal 2018 for further such examples. The chapter also briefly discusses Tom Roeper's multiple grammar theory, which assumes that speakers have subgrammars which accommodate rules that may appear contradictory. [End Page 635] While this approach aims to explain apparent optionality, L's model is motivated by the idea that I-languages form continua and are not split into separate grammars. Ch. 3 introduces basics of minimalism and distributed morphology (MDM). MDM assumes a Y-model of grammar. Structure is formed via the application of Merge, both external and internal. There is also the operation Agree, which establishes dependencies between constituents. L introduces the basic syntactic structures for the nominal and verbal clause, which include a root as the basic unit. Roots become verbs or nouns in a particular morphosyntactic environment, that is, in the presence of an n or...

Rightward movement in a comparative perspective ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker (review)

Reviewed by: Rightward movement in a comparative perspective ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker Michael S. Rochemont Rightward movement in a comparative perspective. Ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 200.) Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. viii, 476. ISBN 9789027255839. $158 (Hb). Rightward movement in a comparative perspective is a useful and wide-ranging collection of papers on constructions that patently display rightward movement, though one of the major issues that arises in discussion of such cases, and no less so in this book, is whether they involve ‘movement’ at all. Indeed, when syntacticians speak of rightward movement they speak metaphorically, since even syntacticians who believe in literal movement do not believe that all nonadjacent dependent relations from the right must involve movement. In fact, at least some rightward movement configurations are generally agreed not to involve movement of a dislocated and rightward-positioned dependent phrase at all (e.g. English relative clause extraposition). It is fitting that this title appears in John Benjamins’s ‘Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today’ series, following on from Rightward movement (Beermann, LeBlanc, & van Riemsdijk 1997). The present volume’s perspective is comparative in several ways: theoretical (different frameworks), empirical (different types of data: corpus-based, experimental, reported grammaticality judgments), and crosslinguistic (different languages and language families). In addition, the chapters overall compare different motivational sources for rightward movement (processing/parsing, syntax, prosodic phonology, or some combination thereof). The book is enhanced by a comprehensive and compelling introduction by the editors that makes a contribution to the study of right-ward movement configurations in its own right. This introduction gives an overview of the analytical challenges that characterize rightward movement configurations in general and relative clause extraposition in particular, and critically surveys existing proposals, including those to be found in the papers that follow in the book. Among the descriptive and explanatory issues that arise are: (i) construal (how does the rightward-positioned dependent constituent recover those aspects of its interpretation that are dependent on a leftward-situated nonadjacent position or host?); (ii) locality/boundedness (what is the source of the varying boundedness effects that govern the relation between the rightward-positioned dependent phrase and its dependent host position, and why do these differ across constructions?); (iii) whether a uniform account of (subsets of) rightward movement configurations is at all possible; (iv) why it is just the constructions so [End Page 500] labeled that appear to involve a specifically rightward dependency relation; (v) why rightward-oriented dependency relations are mandatory in some cases and optional in others (e.g. relative clause extraposition is generally optional, whereas comparative and result clause extraposition or German verbal-complement finite clause extraposition is not); and (vi) what the division of labor is between processing, prosody, and syntax in providing for the specific properties of and motivations for rightward movement configurations of different types. The chapters in this book, including the introduction, together address all of these questions in one form or another, bringing new evidence and perspectives to bear on the issues from comparative, analytical, and psycholinguistic domains of investigation. The editors have conveniently organized the contributions into four sections: empirical, minimalist, other theoretical, and prosodic perspectives. Let us review each in turn. Part 1, ‘Empirical perspective’, begins with two papers exploring the interaction of parsing/ processing effects with syntactic constraints, indicating gradient effects of the latter that are arguably due to considerations of the former. ‘Constraints on intra- and extraposition’, by Markus Bader, Jana Häusler, and Tanja Schmid, presents a study of the acceptability of extraposition of infinitival complements, of modal and of control verbs, to the German Nachfeld: modal verbs demand extraposition of an infinitival complement, while control verbs allow more variability, often easily permitting ‘intraposition’. After careful study of the theoretical literature, and noting the relevance of verb-cluster formation in particular, the authors investigate the issues using both corpus studies and grammaticality-judgment experiments. While modal verbs participate in verbcluster formation whenever possible, control verbs vary in the ease with which they participate in this operation and are therefore more susceptible to the weight considerations that are often associated with parsing...

Formal features in aphasia: Tense, agreement, and mood in English agrammatism

In recent research on aphasia, a considerable number of studies have examined deficits in patients with agrammatism in the domain of verb-finiteness marking in different languages. Whilst much of this research has focused on tense and subject–verb agreement and has shown that tense is particularly impaired, the nature of verb-finiteness deficits in agrammatism is still a matter of controversy. The present study reports new evidence from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment experiments with 9 English-speaking aphasic patients (and 9 matched control subjects) examining tense, agreement, and (subjunctive) mood marking. We found that the patients were more impaired in tense than in (subjunctive) mood or agreement marking. Tense impairments were seen in the sentence-completion and the grammaticality-judgment tasks, for both present and past tense, and for different morphological types. We suggest that the tense deficit in agrammatism is syntactic in nature and affects the specification of the formal feature [±Past] within the inflectional complex of a clause.

Inclusion of auxiliaries: Competence and performance differences in early learners

Researchers argue that variable use of inflectional morphology demonstrates a lack of underlying syntactic representation in second language learners. Others disagree and argue for a full syntactic representation: stating that variable use of morphology during early the stages of learning is due to the difficulty of mapping an underlying representation onto surface form. Twelve beginning L2 learners, whose L1 was Japanese or Korean (East Asians), and nine L2 learners, whose L1 was various Indo-European languages (Non Asians) participated in an elicited imitation experiment, and additional twelve East Asians participated in a grammaticality judgment experiment. The targets included mono-clausal declarative sentences and wh-questions with the auxiliaries be, can, and do. In imitation, the prevalent error was auxiliary omission. Learners fronted whwords successfully. They also inverted auxiliaries successfully when they included them. Along with imitation, the results of grammaticality judgment support the argument that beginning L2 learners have difficulty producing the surface forms of the auxiliaries and tense morphology, not with forming the correct syntactic representation for questions.

The Processing of Formulaic Sequences by Second Language Speakers

A number of researchers have suggested that formulaic sequences are stored and processed holistically (Altenberg, 1998;Raupach, 1984;Schmitt & Carter, 2004;Spöttl & McCarthy, 2004). However, the evidence for this hypothesis has not been conclusive. The present study examined the representation and processing of formulaic sequences in two online grammaticality judgment experiments. English as a second language speakers and native English speakers were tested with formulaic and nonformulaic phrases matched for word length and frequency. The results showed that both native and nonnative speakers responded to the formulaic sequences significantly faster and with fewer errors than they did to nonformulaic sequences. The findings provide prevailing evidence in support of the holistic nature of formula representation and processing in second language speakers.

Gender processing in first and second languages: The role of noun termination.

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times were statistically identical for items from gender typical, ambiguous, and gender atypical groups. The 2 experiments with English bilinguals who had learned German as a second language (L2), however, provided evidence that the L2 word's termination plays a role in L2 gender processing. Participants were fastest when producing gender-marked noun phrases containing a noun with a gender typical termination and slowest when the noun had a gender atypical termination. Analogous results were obtained in the grammaticality judgment experiment. These findings support the assumption that there is interaction between the levels of phonological encoding and grammatical encoding at least in bilingual processing.

Perception of functional morphology in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia show marked deficits in production of functional morphemes such as complementizers (like that and if) and tense and agreement markers (like –ed and –s). Furthermore, production of complementizers appears to be more impaired in many aphasic individuals than production of verbal morphology (Friedmann Hagiwara, 1995; & Grodzinky, 1997; Milman, Dickey, & Thompson, 2004). Some accounts, in particular the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann & Grodzinky, 1997), have linked this production deficit to the hierarchical syntactic structure associated with these morphemes. Specifically, morphemes associated with higher functional projections (e.g., complementizers) are more impaired than those associated with lower projections (e.g., verbal inflections). This paper presents the results of two grammaticality judgment experiments examining the perception of complementizers and verb inflections by English speakers with Broca’s aphasia. If perception patterns with production, perception of complementizers is expected to be more impaired than perception of verbal morphology, particularly under the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis.

On-line grammaticality judgments in French children and adults: a crosslinguistic perspective

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6 ; 8, 8 ; 6 and 10 ; 10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and gender) vs. word order violations; the violation position: early vs. late in the sentence; the target type of the violations: intra vs. interphrasal. An example of an early interphrasal verbal agreement violation follows: 'Chaque semaine la voisine remplissent le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché' (Every week the neighbour fill the fridge after shopping at the market). The main developmental results were the following: not surprisingly, children were always slower than adults in the detection of grammatical violations. At each age level, morphological violations were more rapidly detected than word order violations. Each age group was faster at judging sentences with later occurring violations and the position effect was especially strong in the youngest groups. Finally, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, this effect being observed only in the oldest groups (i.e. 10 ; 10 years and adults). The results were compared to previous on-line data obtained in modern Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998) showing strong similarities, even though Greek is a very rich morphological language. These results are discussed within the framework of the Competition Model, outlining the necessity to incorporate new processing constraints into the model.

Children's Judgments of Negative Questions

In a series of production and grammaticality judgment experiments, I investigated the status of children's non-adult questions with 2 auxiliary verbs, such as What did the smurf didn't buy. Previous studies showed that these questions were produced primarily in negative contexts. In the first part of the study, I tested whether children produce them in positive contexts with contrastive stress. The results confirm that these questions are limited to negative contexts. In the second part, I tested how children judge these questions. If children produce these questions because they have a non-adult grammar, then they should accept these questions. However, the results from 15 children (age 3;11-4;11) show that they produced these questions but judged them unacceptable. I argue that the production of these questions is not the result of a non-adult grammar but rather the result of a performance phenomenon based on incorrect lexical information regarding constituent negation.

Le traitement en temps réel des marques morphologiques d'accord dans des phrases en français

Summary : On-line processing of morphological agreement in French sentences. This study examined on-line processing of verbal and nominal agreement in French sentences. In a grammaticality judgment experiment, subjects were asked to detect as quickly as possible agreement violations : number and/or person in verbal agreement and gender and/or number in nominal agreement. Two factors were manipulated : 1) predictability (number of cues predicting an agreement) ; 2) violation size (number of dimensions violated). As predicted by structural constraints, nominal violations (intraphrasal) were detected more rapidly than verbal ones (interphrasal). Predictability and violation size did have an effect on judgments of grammaticality but their interactions were more complex than predicted. As hypothesized, for verbal agreement, high predictability and small violation size lengthened detection times and increased errors. For nominal agreement, the pattern is reversed : low predictability and large violation size lengthened detection times and increased errors. These contrastive results obtained in French are discussed in the light of some factors : structural and perceptive ones. They underline the necessity to conduct further studies on each type of agreement independently. Key words : grammaticality judgments, on-line sentence processing, verbal agreement, nominal agreement.

How children's relatives solve a problem for minimalism

Current work in syntax reexamines basic properties of movement. Under the minimalist assumptions of Chomsky (1995), movement is prohibited unless forced by grammatical considerations. From a set of comparable derivations, the one involving the least amount of moved material should therefore block other derivations. Within this framework, any cases of optional movement are problematic. We addressed this issue with experiments on stranding and pied-piping in relative clauses in 115 English learners, aged 3;5 to 11;11, and an adult control group. All subjects participated in an elicited production experiment and a grammaticality judgment experiment. Our findings suggest that pied-piping is possible in young children's grammars only when stranding is ruled out, as predicted by minimalism. We claim the children's responses represent the 'natural' grammar while the adults' responses reflect a prescriptive artifact. We also found a discrepancy in all subject groups between production and judgments of the genitive pied-piping construction. We account for this finding with Kayne's (1994) analysis of relative clauses.

A crosslinguistic study of grammaticality judgments in Broca's aphasia

Crosslinguistic studies of sentence comprehension and production in Broca's aphasia have yielded two complementary findings: (1) grammatical morphology appears to be more impaired than word order principles in every language studied, but (2) the degree to which grammatical morphology is retained by aphasic patients depends upon the “strength” or importance of those morphemes in the patient's premorbid language. In an earlier study comparing violations of word order and agreement, we found that English-speaking Broca's aphasics showed greater sensitivity to errors of ordering than to errors of agreement, providing further evidence for the selective vulnerability of morphology. However, because English is a rigid word order language with a relatively weak inflectional system, it could be argued that word order is resilient to brain damage because it is the strongest source of information in this language. The present study compared the performance of English-speaking Broca's aphasics and normal controls with their Italian counterparts in the same grammaticality judgment experiment. Four predictions relating to our previous work were confirmed. (1) Italian aphasics, like their English-speaking counterparts, showed general preservation of grammatical knowledge and (2) they were able to use this knowledge in an “on-line” fashion. (3) Within each language, Broca's aphasics showed greater impairment in their ability to recognize errors of morphological selection (i.e., agreement) compared with errors made by moving the same words to an incorrect position downstream. Nevertheless (4), crosslinguistic differences observed in previous studies of comprehension and production were also observed in this grammaticality judgment task: a processing advantage for agreement errors in Italian normals and aphasics, and a processing advantage for ordering errors in English normals and aphasics.