Self-paced Reading Experiments Research Articles

Processing Chinese relative clauses: evidence for the subject-relative advantage.

A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78–80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation—retrieval/integration cost—at least for relative clause processing in Chinese.

Processing tense/aspect-agreement violations on-line in the second language: A self-paced reading study with French and German L2 learners of English

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. * Last week, James has gone swimming every day) in their on-line comprehension. The L2 learners were equally able to distinguish correctly the past simple from the present perfect as measured by a traditional cloze test production task. They were also both able to assess the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment task. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigated whether they could access this knowledge during real-time processing. Despite performing similarly in the explicit tasks, the two learner groups processed the experimental items differently from each other in real time. On-line, only the French L2 learners were sensitive to the mismatch conditions in both the past simple and the present perfect contexts, whereas the German L2 learners did not show a processing cost at all for either mismatch type. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 groups can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1): namely, only those whose L1 has grammaticized aspect (French) were sensitive to the tense/aspect violations on-line, and thus could be argued to have implicit knowledge of English tense/aspect distinctions.

The effect of discourse structure on depth of semantic integration in reading

A coherent discourse exhibits certain structures in that subunits of discourses are related to one another in various ways and in that subunits that contribute to the same discourse purpose are joined to create a larger unit so as to produce an effect on the reader. To date, this crucial aspect of discourse has been largely neglected in the psycholinguistic literature. In two experiments, we examined whether semantic integration in discourse context was influenced by the difference of discourse structure. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence was locally congruent but either semantically congruent or incongruent when interpreted with the preceding sentence. Furthermore, the last sentence was either in the same discourse unit or not in the same discourse unit as the preceding sentence, depending on whether they shared the same discourse purpose. Results from self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and eye tracking (Experiment 2) showed that discourse-incongruous words were read longer than discourse-congruous words only when the critical sentence and the preceding sentence were in the same discourse unit, but not when they belonged to different discourse units. These results establish discourse structure as a new factor in semantic integration and suggest that discourse effects depend both on the content of what is being said and on the way that the contents are organized.

The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses.

Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on some constructions in some languages. Here we report four self-paced reading experiments on the online comprehension of Russian relative clauses together with related corpus studies, taking advantage of Russian’s flexible word order to disentangle predictions of competing theories. We find support for key predictions of memory-based theories in reading times at RC verbs, and for key predictions of expectation-based theories in processing difficulty at RC-initial accusative noun phrase (NP) objects, which corpus data suggest should be highly unexpected. These results suggest that a complete theory of syntactic complexity must integrate insights from both expectation-based and memory-based theories.

Anaphoric biases of null and overt subjects in Italian and Spanish: a cross-linguistic comparison

The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian in the anaphoric interpretation of null subjects and overt pronominal subjects. The availability of null subjects in a language is determined by the parametric settings of its syntax, but their felicitous use as an alternative to overt pronouns depends on contextual conditions affecting how different expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse. According to Accessibility Theory, at least some of these principles must have universal validity; however, up to now no experimental research has been carried out with the aim of comparing directly the interpretation of anaphoric dependencies in two typologically similar null subject languages. In this paper, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian. The results show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas the resolution of overt pronouns seems to diverge. This suggests that subtle differences restricted to the scope of the overt pronoun yield systematic variation between the two languages.

On the origin of islands

There is considerable controversy on island constraints on wh-dependencies in the psycholinguistic literature. One major point of contention is whether islands result from processing limitations such as working memory capacity or from domain-specific linguistic knowledge. The current study investigates whether islands can be reduced to processing considerations, by examining processing of another long-distance dependency, cataphora. If wh-dependencies with the licensing element (the verb or preposition) falling inside an island entail an unbearable memory load on the parser, then other dependencies, including cataphora, with a licensing element (the antecedent), falling inside an island, should yield a similar processing difficulty. The results from a self-paced reading experiment demonstrate that online formation of a cataphoric dependency is not affected by island constraints. We conclude that islands are not fully reducible to processing considerations and therefore must – at least in part – be of grammatical origin.

The Role of Only in Contrasts In and Out of Context

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of only and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle only predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., “The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist”) with only on the subject or object showed faster reading of the contrast phrase (“not the artist”) than without it. The position of only also influenced the phrase's meaning; despite a bias toward object contrasts, subject only increased subject interpretations. If preceding context provides another reason for the focus particle, it no longer predicts an upcoming contrast. In biasing contexts including indirect questions, there was no facilitation when only marked the argument that answered the question, whereas only on the other argument slowed processing. Both only and context influenced interpretation. The results show that focus particles and questions can each influence processing of an upcoming contrast on- and off-line.

Comparing the roles of referents and event structures in parsing preferences

Recent work has shown that potentially reciprocal verbs are interpreted reciprocally when their subjects are complex reference objects (plural referents that incorporate multiple referents), but transitively when their subjects are undifferentiated plural sets. Four self-paced reading experiments investigated why this is the case. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that the parser's behaviour is driven by the complexity or specificity of potential event structures with the hypothesis that what matters is simply the availability of multiple referents. First we replicated Patson & Ferreira's Experiment 1 with self-paced reading, and then in three studies we manipulated the conjuncts within a conjoined noun phrase (NP) subject (e.g. the men and the women vs. the man and the women) in order to vary event structures. The results indicated that potentially reciprocal verbs were interpreted as reciprocal with any conjoined subject, regardless of what type of NPs comprised it. This suggests that the parser is sensitive specifically to the presence of referents, not to the relative complexity or specificity of the event structure that could be built based on those referents. These findings are consistent with Patson and Ferreira's hypothesis that available referents matter because they immediately saturate the thematic roles of reciprocal verbs.

Predictive processing of syntactic structure: Sluicing and ellipsis in real-time sentence processing

This paper investigates the prediction of syntactic structure during sentence processing, using constructions that temporarily allow a sluicing interpretation in English. Making use of two well-known properties of sluicing and pronoun interpretation—connectivity effects and the local antecedent requirement on reflexives, respectively—we show that (1) the parser chooses a sluicing structure over other possible structures when sluicing is a possibility, and (2) the structure which the parser posits for sluicing involves detailed hierarchical syntactic structure. A self-paced reading experiment and three offline experiments (two acceptability rating studies and a sentence completion study) find evidence that readers immediately try to associate a reflexive pronoun embedded inside a wh-phrase with a potential antecedent in the preceding clause. However, this association is made only if a sluicing structure is a possible continuation of the sentence. This finding suggests that readers actively anticipated a sluicing structure when it was grammatically permissible, and that this structure is sufficiently detailed to license reflexive binding. This result adds to the increasing evidence that comprehenders make detailed predictions regarding upcoming linguistic structure.

The object before subject bias and the processing of double-gap relative clauses in Japanese

We report a fragment-completion questionnaire and a self-paced reading experiment investigating relative clauses in Japanese that contain two extraction sites in the same clause. The results indicate that in such double-gap relative clauses there is a preference to fill the object position before the subject position. Previous factors, especially those related to working memory resources, which have often been implicated in extraction preferences, do not predict the patterns observed. The results support the proposal that the accessibility of extraction sites in relative clauses is inversely correlated to the order in which semantic roles are preferentially assigned. We discuss ways of incorporating such a constraint in previous proposals such as expectation-based models.

Null pronominal (pro) resolution in Korean, a discourse-oriented language

We report a self-paced reading experiment examining the effect of morpho-syntactic and discourse cues on the resolution of null pronominals in Korean. Unlike many other languages, Korean does not have many morphological cues that could aid reference assignment for null pronominals. Indeed, work in theoretical linguistics has classified Korean as a “discourse oriented language”, in which empty arguments can be identified through discourse topics, with less reliance on sentence-internal cues than is the case for “sentence oriented” languages such as English. The experiment used a person-mismatch paradigm to test whether, once assigned to a discourse topic, the reference of the null pronominal could be shifted to a new intra-sentential antecedent, on the basis of morpho-syntactic cues, as has been shown in work in English on overt pronouns. The findings show that the null pronominal was assigned to the discourse topic on-line during the reading of the sentence, but that the re-assignment to the intra-sentential antecedent did not take place, despite the morpho-syntactic cues. Instead, co-reference with the intra-sentential subject was attempted only when there was no antecedent in the context. We interpret these findings in terms of the relatively high priority that Korean places on discourse cues.

Processing Chinese relative clauses in context

This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature for the comparison between Chinese SRCs and ORCs is due to potential temporary ambiguity in these constructions in null contexts. By placing the materials in contexts biased towards a relative clause (RC) interpretation, we limit the effects of temporary ambiguity. The results of the experiment demonstrate that SRCs are read more slowly than ORCs in supportive contexts. These results provide evidence for working memory-based sentence processing theories whereby processing difficulty increases for connecting sentence elements that are further apart. Some convergent evidence that strengthens these conclusions comes from recent research on aphasic populations where a dissociation between English and Chinese RC processing has been revealed: whereas English aphasic patients have more difficulty with ORCs and Chinese aphasic patients have more difficulty with SRCs (Su, Lee, & Chung, 2007). Taken together, these results support the idea that sentence processing is constrained by working memory limitations.

Empirical evidence for an inflationist lexicon

Although generative and construction grammars both assume that some linguistic forms are stored/retrieved as wholes while others are strung together from simpler part, they differ with respect to the units that may be stored in the lexicon, and therefore in the rules that combine them. Within the generative framework, the determining factor for storage is regularity. In contrast, for construction grammarians frequency of use is an important factor determining whether a form is stored as a whole or (de)composed on-line. We present empirical evidence from self-paced reading, sentence recall, and chunk production experiments showing that speakers are sensitive to the frequency of use of regular, non-idiomatic multi-word sequences (at the end of ), thus suggesting that they are stored/retrieved as wholes (favoring the constructionist view). However, these frequency effects could rather reflect speeded/practiced rule-based (de)composition. Results from our chunk recall experiment with event-related potential recordings suggest that (some aspects) of such multi-word sequences may be holistically stored/retrieved.

The Interaction of Syntactic and Lexical Information Sources in Language Processing: The Case of the Noun-verb Ambiguity

This paper reports the results of a lexical decision experiment and a selfpaced reading experiment that investigate the interaction between syntactic and lexical information in on-line language processing, using the noun-verb ambiguity in English. The results of both experiments provide support for the hypothesis whereby syntactic and lexical information are two independent factors in the process of sentence comprehension, consistent with previous work in the sense-ambiguity processing literature. Our results therefore add to the body of literature that demonstrates that the process of language comprehension is guided by numerous independent information sources, rather than syntactic information alone, as some of the earlier proposals in the field of sentence pro cessing hypothesized.

Feeling the past: The absence of experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on text processing

In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the hypothesis that information moves backward in time to influence prior behaviors (Bem Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100:407-425, 2011a). In two of Bem's experiments, words were presented after target pictures in a pleasantness judgment task. In a condition in which the words were consistent with the emotional valence of the picture, reaction times to the pictures were significantly shorter , as compared with a condition in which the words were inconsistent with the emotional valence of the picture. Bem Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100:407-425, (2011a) interpreted these results as showing a "retroactive priming" effect resulting from precognition. To test the precognition hypothesis, we adapted a standard repetition priming paradigm from psycholinguistics. In the experiments, participants read a set of texts. In one condition, the participants read the same text twice. In other conditions, participants read two different texts. The precognition hypothesis predicts that readers who encounter the same text twice will experience reductions in processing load during their first encounter with the text. Hence, these readers' average reading times should be shorter than those of readers who encounter the target text only once. Our results indicated that readers processed the target text faster the second time they read it. Also, their reading times decreased as their experience with the self-paced reading procedure increased. However, participants read the target text equally quickly during their initial encounter with the text, whether or not the text was subsequently repeated. Thus, the experiments demonstrated normal repetition priming and practice effects but offered no evidence for retroactive influences on text processing.

Sentence Complexity and Working Memory Effects in Ambiguity Resolution

Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both offline RC attachment preferences and in online reading time measures, but no effects of syntactic complexity. In Experiment 2 (Korean), syntactic complexity due to greater distance between integrating heads, as measured by the dependency locality theory (Gibson in Cognition 68:1-76, 1998), significantly increased the proportion of attachment to NP1. However, no effects of working memory were found. The difference in results between English and Korean is proposed to be due to head-directionality effects. The results of our study support the conclusion that working memory-based accounts provide a better explanation than previous language-dependent accounts for differences in RC attachment preferences. We propose that previous language dependent-accounts of cross-linguistic differences in RC processing have overlooked the interaction between individual WMC and a language's general structure, which is a central factor in RC attachment.

Processing Relative Clauses in Supportive Contexts

Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These results are not consistent with a decay-based working memory account of dependency formation where the amount of decay is a function of the number of new discourse referents that intervene between the dependents (Gibson, 1998; Warren & Gibson, 2002). Rather, these results support interference-based accounts and decay-based accounts where the amount of decay depends on the number of words or on the type of noun phrases that intervene between the dependents. In Experiment 2, presentation in supportive contexts was directly contrasted with presentation in null contexts. Whereas in the null context the extraction effect was only observed during the RC region, in a supportive context the extraction effect was numerically larger and persisted into the following region, thus showing that extraction effects are enhanced in supportive contexts. A sentence completion study demonstrated that the rate of SRCs versus ORCs was similar across null and supportive contexts (with most completions being subject-extractions), ruling out the possibility that an enhanced extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to ORCs being less expected in such contexts. However, the content of the RCs differed between contexts in the completions, such that the RCs produced in supportive contexts were more constrained, reflecting the lexical and semantic content of the preceding context. This effect, which we discuss in terms of expectations/lexico-syntactic priming, suggests that the enhancement of the extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to the facilitation of the subject-extracted condition.

TÓPICOS E SUJEITOS NO PB: UMA ABORDAGEM EXPERIMENTAL / Topics and subjects in Brazilian Portuguese: an experimental approach

This paper presents some preliminary results of an experimental research on Brazilian Portuguese’ s (BP) topicalization structures. We discuss the results of a self-paced reading experiment that tested the hypothesis according to which BP must be analyzed as a discourse-oriented language, as it is assumed by Pontes (1987) and Kato (2006) among others. We also provide a brief review of both theoretical and empirical arguments against Pontes and Kato’s hypothesis.

FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES AND ISLAND CONSTRAINTS IN SECOND-LANGUAGE SENTENCE PROCESSING

Second-language (L2) sentence processing may differ from processing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The present study challenges this hypothesis by comparing the extent to which advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English learners and English native speakers make use of the relative clause island constraint in constructing filler-gap dependencies. In offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading experiments that used stimuli adapted from Traxler and Pickering (1996), both the L2 group and the native-speaker control group demonstrated clear evidence for application of the relative clause island constraint. These findings suggest that advanced L2 learners not only build abstract structural representations but also rapidly constrain the active search for a gap location. These results cast doubt on the proposal that L2 learners are unable to build structural representations with grammatical precision.

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty.