Comprehension Of Object Relatives Research Articles

Comprehension of object relatives in Spanish: the role of frequency and transparency in acquisition and adult grammar

Abstract This study investigates the relative roles of frequency and transparency in native speakers’ comprehension of Spanish object relative sentences by comparing performance with two variants of the construction that differ in these properties. Experiment 1 suggests that seven- to eight-year-old children’s processing of object relative sentences is consistently facilitated by variant frequency and likely relies on separate representations for each variant as two different, although related constructions. Experiment 2 turns to adult comprehension of the two variants, showing similar accuracy and reaction time patterns for both variants for this population. This second outcome could be interpreted as a decrease in frequency effects over time, in line with the power law of practice, as an experience-based increase in the ability to make use of redundant markers, or both.

Explicit instruction improves the comprehension of Spanish object relatives by young monolingual children

Abstract The present study assessed the comprehension of Spanish object relative (OR) clauses by 6- and 7-year-old children before and after a brief training session targeting the structural differences between ORs and subject relatives. In addition, we investigated the potential relationships between OR comprehension on the one hand and vocabulary size and non-verbal intelligence quotient (IQ) on the other. Comprehension of ORs was very poor at the pre-test but improved considerably after training. Further improvement was observed between the immediate post-test and a delayed post-test, suggesting that the knowledge acquired during training had been integrated into the children’s developing linguistic systems. Non-verbal IQ and vocabulary were not found to predict comprehension accuracy. We take these results to suggest that children’s difficulties with ORs are better explained by their experience with this construction than by maturational factors and that explicit contrast and feedback can bolster grammatical development in L1 acquisition.

Similarity-based interference in agreement comprehension and production: Evidence from object agreement.

Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the presence of an attractor mismatching the agreement feature of the target. In contrast, results from comprehension studies are mixed, ranging from lack of effect to facilitation. We report 2 forced-choice experiments and 2 self-paced reading experiments on number and gender object-verb agreement in French to systematically explore the effect of a mismatching subject in the production and comprehension of object relatives. Results show that the presence of a mismatching subject penalizes sentence production, in line with reports of attraction, but consistently improves sentence comprehension in off-line comprehension measures, in line with similarity-based interference effects. We discuss the limits of classical models of sentence production and comprehension (Marking and Morphing and ACT-R), and favor a self-organizing sentence processing approach (SOSP), which accounts for both production and comprehension results through a single similarity-based mechanism of structure building. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Comprehension of Complex Sentences in the Persian-Speaking Patients With Aphasia.

Introduction:To study sentence comprehension in Persian-speaking Patients with Aphasia considering the factors of complexity.Methods:In this cross-sectional study, the performance of 6 non-fluent aphasic patients were tested and their performance was compared to 15 matched control group. Comprehension of semantically reversible sentences was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The stimuli were as follows: clefts; subject clefts and object clefts, also relative clauses; subject relatives and object relatives. All of them were types of movement-derived structures and also simple declarative sentences as the control task.Results:The best performance of aphasic patients were seen in the comprehension of subject clefts, although prior to this result we assumed that simple declarative sentences (in which there is no structural factor of complexity) can be understood easily. They showed the highest difficulty in the comprehension of object relatives. Furthermore, the performance of patients in the comprehension of relative clauses was significantly weaker than understanding the clefts.Conclusion:The outcomes of this study suggest that the sentence comprehension deficits of aphasic patients, in contrast to the specific deficit models, may not be related to linguistic disabilities. Moreover, the problems in the comprehension of non-canonical sentences may be related to failure in the allocation of attention. Finally, our results support the claims that neural characterization of the cognitive resources (e.g. working memory) is disrupted in sentence comprehension deficits.

The boy that the chef cooked: Acquisition of PP relatives in European Portuguese and Hebrew

Subject–object asymmetries are well documented in the acquisition of relative clauses. Difficulties in the production and comprehension of object relatives have been explained in terms of the intervention of a DP in between the moved constituent and its base-generated position (Friedmann et al., 2009). This paper investigates the comprehension and production of prepositional relative clauses by children acquiring European Portuguese and Hebrew, in order to further understand the atoms of intervention. Specifically, PP relatives in these two languages can provide insights into whether categorial identity and grammatical function play a role in intervention effects. Experiment 1 tested the comprehension of PP object relatives compared to subject- and DP object relatives in Hebrew and European Portuguese using a picture selection task. Experiment 2 tested the comprehension of adjunct PP relatives in Hebrew. Experiment 3 tested the production of PP complement and adjunct relatives compared to subject- and DP object relatives in Hebrew and European Portuguese. Experiment 4 tested the production of PP object relatives in the context of a definition task. We found that PP and DP object relatives are both comprehended and produced poorly independently of the language, that PP complement and adjunct relatives show similar comprehension and production, and that resumption – a strategy used in production – does not improve comprehension. These findings bear on the understanding of atoms of intervention in acquisition, indicating that grammatical category and grammatical function are not relevant for the computation of intervention.

Role of Working Memory Storage and Attention Focus Switching in Children’s Comprehension of Spoken Object Relative Sentences

The present study evaluated a two-mechanism memory model of the online auditory comprehension of object relative (OR) sentences in 7–11-year-old typically developing children. Mechanisms of interest included working memory storage (WMS) and attention focus switching. We predicted that both mechanisms would be important for comprehension. Forty-four children completed a listening span task indexing WMS, an auditory attention focus switching task, and an agent selection task indexing spoken sentence comprehension. Regression analyses indicated that WMS and attention focus switching accuracy each accounted for significant and unique variance in the children’s OR comprehension after accounting for age. Results were interpreted to suggest that WMS is important for OR comprehension by supporting children’s ability to retain both noun phrase 1 and noun phrase 2 prior to their reactivating noun phrase 1 from memory in order to integrate it into a developing structure. Attention focus switching was interpreted to be critical in supporting children’s noun phrase 1 reactivation, as they needed to switch their focus of attention momentarily away from ongoing language processing to memory retrieval.

Does gender make a difference? Comparing the effect of gender on children's comprehension of relative clauses in Hebrew and Italian

In this paper we assessed the effect of gender morphology on children's comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew and Italian. We compared headed object relative clauses in which the relative head (the moved object) and the intervening embedded subject have the same or different genders. The participants were 62 children aged 3;9–5;5, 31 speakers of Hebrew and 31 speakers of Italian. The comprehension of relative clauses was assessed using a sentence–picture matching task. The main result was that whereas gender mismatch sharply improved the comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew, it did not significantly affect comprehension in Italian. In line with our previous work (Friedmann et al., 2009), we propose that the children's problem in the comprehension of headed object relatives stems from the intervention of the embedded subject between the moved relative head and its trace. We ascribe the different behavior of children in Hebrew and in Italian to the different status of the gender feature in the two languages: in Hebrew, gender is part of the featural composition of the clausal inflectional head, hence it is part of the feature set attracting the subject, whereas in Italian, where tensed verbs are not inflected for gender, it is not. Under the assumption that intervention effects are amenable to the locality principle Relativized Minimality, it is expected that only features functioning as attractors for syntactic movement will enter into the computation of intervention. We thus account for the different effect of gender mismatch in object relative comprehension in the two developing systems. Thus, the main finding of this work is comparative in nature: there is no effect of gender per se; rather, the potential effect of gender is crucially modulated by the morphosyntactic status of the feature in each language.

Traceless relatives: Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses with resumptive pronouns

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia fail to interpret reversible movement-derived sentences. According to the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, this impairment in comprehension results from the deletion of traces of phrasal movement. In order to test this hypothesis, we compared object relatives with a trace to identical object relatives that are not derived by syntactic movement and do not include a trace, but rather include a resumptive pronoun at the position of the embedded object. Five Hebrew-speaking individuals with agrammatism and 5 matched controls participated in this study. Comprehension was assessed using a binary sentence–picture matching task of 120 reversible relative clauses per participant, 40 subject relatives, 40 object relatives, and 40 object relatives with a resumptive pronoun. The comprehension of subject relatives was significantly above chance, but the comprehension of both types of object relative was at chance. Importantly, the insertion of a resumptive pronoun at the position of the trace did not improve comprehension. The comprehension of object relatives with resumptive pronouns was at chance, and not different from the comprehension of object relatives with traces. Two modifications for the Trace Deletion Hypothesis are considered: a more general deficit in thematic role assignment over an intervening argument, or a deficit in the construction of CP that results in failure to make the syntactic relation between the relative head above CP, the operator in CP and the embedded pronoun or trace within the relative clause.

Sentence comprehension and working memory limitation in aphasia: A dissociation between semantic-syntactic and phonological reactivation

The relation between working memory (WM) limitation and sentence comprehension was assessed in Hebrew-speaking aphasics, three conduction aphasics and three agrammatics. The study compared sentences that required different types of reactivation—syntactic-semantic reactivation, in relative clauses, and word form/phonological reactivation, in sentences with reanalysis of lexical ambiguity. The effect of phonological memory load, manipulated by number of words intervening between the activation and the reactivation, on comprehension of the two sentence types was examined. The findings were that agrammatic aphasics failed in the comprehension of object relatives but not on subject relatives irrespective of their antecedent–gap distance. Conduction aphasics, on the other hand, who showed severe WM limitation, comprehended well all types of relative clauses and were unaffected by antecedent–gap distance. The conduction aphasics failed to understand the sentences that required phonological reactivation when the phonological distance was long. These results suggest that the type of reactivation required by the sentence, as well as the type of memory overload are crucial in determining the effect of WM limitation on sentence comprehension.