Self-paced Reading Experiments Research Articles

The use of context in resolving syntactic ambiguity: structural and semantic influences

ABSTRACTVerb bias facilitates parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, but it is unclear when and how comprehenders use probabilistic knowledge about the combinatorial properties of verbs in context. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read direct object/sentential complement sentences. Reading time in the critical region was investigated as a function of three forms of bias: structural bias (the frequency with which a verb appears in direct object/sentential complement sentences), lexical bias (the simple co-occurrence of verbs and other lexical items), and global bias (obtained from norming data about the use of verbs with specific noun phrases). For reading times at the critical word, structural bias was the only reliable predictor. However, global bias was superior to structural and lexical bias at the post-critical word and for offline acceptability ratings. The results suggest that structural information about verbs is available immediately, but that context-specific, semantic information becomes increasingly informative as processing proceeds.

Online Application of Principle C in L2 Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Self-­Paced Reading

The Journal of Studies in Language 35.1, 085-095. This study reports the results from a self-paced reading experiment that investigates Korean-English second language (L2) speakers’ online sensitivity to Principle C on online pronoun resolution. I examine this in the context of strong crossover (SCO) configurations in English to explore the effects of first language (L1) and proficiency on L2 processing. The findings show that proficiency appears to predict Korean-English L2 speakers’ use of target grammatical knowledge online. Highly-proficient Korean-English L2 speakers demonstrate sensitivity to the SCO constraint during online pronoun resolution in that they do not consider a fronted wh-phrase as a potential antecedent for a gender-matched pronoun that intervenes the wh-phrase and its gap. However, the SCO constraint does not restrict less-proficient Korean-English L2 speakers’ online pronoun resolution. The findings also suggest that L1 is not a determinant factor in L2 processing; that is to say, L2 processing is not fundamentally different from L1 processing. (Korea University)

When is the verb a potential gap site? The influence of filler maintenance on the active search for a gap

ABSTRACTThroughout an open filler-gap dependency, some features of the filler are actively maintained in working-memory, while others decay and are retrieved at the gap. The current study asks whether the availability of certain features of the filler (due to their maintenance) influences the parser’s attempt to posit a gap upon encountering a verb. We report the results of two self-paced reading experiments testing the hypothesis that maintained features guide active gap-filling. Experiment 1 used similarity-based interference to show that animacy is a maintained feature. Experiment 2 combined a filled-gap design and a plausibility manipulation, with violation of either the animacy requirement or some other selectional restriction of the verb, to test when an attempt to resolve a dependency is made despite poor fit between the verb and the filler. Results suggest that only verbs selecting an argument with features like those maintained in the filler’s representation trigger an attempt to resolve the dependency.

Persistent structural priming during online second-language comprehension.

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2 filler sentences of unrelated structures. Moreover, the magnitude of the priming effect held constant across different lag conditions. Experiment 2 replicated the persistent priming effect and ruled out the possibility that the effect was due to verb repetition priming. Taken together, the current results suggest that recent experience with a given structure can have relatively long-lived facilitation effect on the language-processing system in second-language learners. As such, structural priming may serve as a learning mechanism for second-language speakers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Delayed Application of Binding Condition C During Cataphoric Pronoun Resolution

Previous research has shown that during cataphoric pronoun resolution, the predictive search for an antecedent is restricted by a structure-sensitive constraint known as 'Condition C', such that an antecedent is only considered when the constraint does not apply. Evidence has mainly come from self-paced reading (SPR), a method which may not be able to pick up on short-lived effects over the timecourse of processing. This study investigates whether or not the active search mechanism is constrained by Condition C at all points in time during cataphoric processing. We carried out one eye-tracking during reading and a parallel SPR experiment, accompanied by offline coreference judgment tasks. Although offline judgments about coreference were constrained by Condition C, the eye-tracking experiment revealed temporary consideration of antecedents that should be ruled out by Condition C. The SPR experiment using exactly the same materials indicated, conversely, that only structurally appropriate antecedents were considered. Taken together, our results suggest that the application of Condition C may be delayed during naturalistic reading.

Japanese EFL learners’ sentence processing of conceptual plurality: An analysis focusing on reciprocal verbs

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing second language conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.

Eye-tracking evidence for active gap-filling regardless of dependency length.

Previous work on real-time sentence processing has established that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies without waiting for unambiguous evidence about the actual location of the gap ("active gap-filling") as long as such dependencies are grammatically licensed. However, this generalisation was called into question by recent findings in a self-paced reading experiment by Wagers and Phillips, which may be taken to show that comprehenders do not interpret the filler at the posited gap when the dependency spans a longer distance. In the present study, we aimed to replicate these findings in an eye-tracking experiment with better controlled materials and increased statistical power. Crucially, we found clear evidence for active gap-filling across all levels of dependency length. This diverges from Wagers and Phillips's findings but is in line with the long-standing generalisation that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies predictively as long as they are grammatically licensed. We found that the effect became smaller in the long dependency conditions in the post-critical region, which suggests the weaker effect in the long dependency conditions may have been undetected in Wagers and Phillips's study due to insufficient statistical power and/or the use of a self-paced reading paradigm.

Beginning readers might benefit from digital texts presented in a sentence-by-sentence fashion. But why?

The current digital era offers many possibilities to modify the layout of a text to optimize reading and improve comprehension. Here, we examined the idea that the visuo-spatial properties of segmented layouts support beginning readers by reducing the demands of basic eye-movement processes. In a series of self-paced reading experiments, text comprehension and reading speed of second- and third-grade pupils (N = 348) were assessed in a baseline condition (i.e., sentences continued on the same line as far as page width allowed) and three conditions with a segmented layout: (1) a discontinuous layout in which each sentence was presented on a new line of the page; (2) a reader-paced Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) layout in which the texts were presented sentence by sentence; (3) a reader-paced RSVP layout in which the texts were presented word by word. No advantages were observed for the discontinuous layout. However, at the expense of increased reading times, robust comprehension advantages emerged for the two RSVP layouts. The observed trade-off between speed and accuracy suggests that a RSVP-based layout induces more precise reading, rather than reducing the demands on basic decoding and oculomotor control processes. These findings will be discussed in the context of individual differences in reading skills and several high-potential digital applications that aim at enhancing the abilities of (beginning) readers (e.g., Spritz, BeeLine Reader).

Native and non-native (L1-Mandarin) speakers of English differ in online use of verb-based cues about sentence structure

This study examined whether L1-Mandarin learners of L2-English use verb bias and complementizer cues to process temporarily ambiguous English sentences the same way native speakers do. SVO word order places verbs early in sentences in both languages, allowing the use of verb-based knowledge to anticipate what could follow. The two languages differ, however, in whether an optional complementizer signals embedded clauses. In a self-paced reading experiment, native English speakers and L1-Mandarin learners of L2-English read sentences containing temporary ambiguity about whether a noun was the direct object of the verb preceding it or the subject of an embedded clause. Native speakers replicated previous work showing an optimally efficient interactive pattern of cue use, while non-native learners showed additive effects of the two cues, consistent with predictions of the Competition Model about learning how to use multiple cues in a second language that sometimes agree and sometimes do not.

Genre and linguistic expectation shift: Evidence from pop song lyrics

AbstractPopular song lyrics constitute an exception to dominant, standard language ideologies of English: nonstandard grammatical forms are common, relatively unstigmatized, and even enregistered in the genre. This project uses song lyrics to test whether genre cues can shift linguistic expectations, influencing how speakers process morphosyntactic variants. In three self-paced reading experiments, participants read sentences from pop songs. Test sentences contained either ‘standard’ NPSG+doesn'tor ‘nonstandard’ NPSG+don't. In Experiment 1, some participants were told that the sentences came from lyrics, while others received no context information. Experiment 2 eliminated other nonstandardisms in the stimuli, and Experiment 3 tested for the effect of stronger context information. Genre information caused participants to orient to the sentences differently, which partially—but not straightforwardly—mitigated surprisal at nonstandarddon't. I discuss future directions for understanding the effects of context on sociolinguistic processing, which I argue can inform concepts like genre and enregisterment, and the processes underlying language attitudes. (Morphosyntactic variation, genre, invariantdon't, language ideology, pop songs, experimental sociolinguistics, sentence processing)*

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: Experimental Evidence for Selective Agreement Attraction Effects.

Research on memory retrieval during sentence comprehension suggests that similarity-based interference is mediated by the grammatical function of the distractor. For instance, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) observed interference during retrieval for subject-verb thematic binding when the distractor occurred as an oblique argument inside a prepositional phrase (PP), but not when it occurred as a core argument in direct object position. This contrast motivated the proposal that constituent encodings vary in the distinctiveness of their memory representations based on an argument hierarchy, which makes them differentially susceptible to interference. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested. The present study uses an interference paradigm involving agreement attraction (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009) to test whether the argument status of the distractor determines susceptibility to interference. Results from two self-paced reading experiments show a clear contrast: agreement attraction is observed for oblique arguments (e.g., PP distractors), but attraction is nullified for core arguments (i.e., direct object and subject distractors). A follow-up experiment showed that this contrast cannot be reduced to the syntactic position of the distractor, favoring an account based on the semantic properties of the distractor. These findings support the proposal that interference is mediated by the argument status of the distractor and extend previous results by showing that the effect generalizes to a broader set of syntactic contexts and a wider range of syntactic dependencies. More generally, these results motivate a more nuanced account of real-time agreement processing that depends on both retrieval and encoding mechanisms.

An experimental investigation of the binding options of demonstrative pronouns in German

This paper discusses data from two self-paced reading experiments as well as an acceptability rating study that shed light on the binding behaviour of demonstrative pronouns as opposed to personal pronouns. Participants read (Experiments 1 & 2) or rated (Experiment 3) single sentences that contained either a demonstrative pronoun (DPro) or a personal pronoun (PPro). Sentences contained a determiner phrase (DP) that functioned as the grammatical subject and a DP that functioned as the direct, indirect or prepositional object. The pronoun was either contained in the direct object DP or a prepositional object DP. In half of the sentences, pronouns could only be interpreted as bound by the subject DP. In the other half of sentences, they could only be interpreted as bound by the object DP. Results from Experiment 1 reveal similar reading times for DPros and PPros when they were bound by the object DP, and significantly longer reading times for DPros than PPros when they were bound by the subject DP. Experiment 2 replicated the DPro effect from Experiment 1 with materials where potential subject and object binders were quantifiers. Finally, Experiment 3 shows that also in the context of quantifier binding DPros are not generally dispreferred. Sentences with a DPro were only rated as less acceptable than sentences with a PPro when the potential binder was the subject. Taken together, our data provide evidence that DPros can be bound as long as their binders are not grammatical subjects.

Idiomaticidade, familiaridade e informação prévia no processamento de expressões idiomáticas do PB

Expressões idiomáticas são comumente caracterizadas como combinações fixas e não-composicionais nas quais o sentido figurado não constitui uma função da soma das partes; seu grau de composicionalidade, entretanto, é variável. Este artigo investiga a compreensão de expressões idiomáticas do tipo verbo-complemento no português brasileiro (ex. “pintar o sete”, “passar a bola”). Buscamos avaliar em que medida propriedades internas e externas das expressões podem influenciar no processamento das mesmas. Reportamos os resultados de um experimento de leitura automonitorada (conduzido por meio de uma maze task), no qual o segmento crítico corresponde à complementação do verbo: idiomático vs. literal (ex. abrir o coração/ a porta). Os resultados revelaram efeitos estatisticamente significativos das três variáveis investigadas, sugerindo que o grau de idiomaticidade, a familiaridade do falante com a expressão e a informação prévia afetam o processamento das expressões e, portanto, devem ser considerados num modelo que busque explicitar a representação, o acesso e a compreensão dessas estruturas.

Event-duration semantics in online sentence processing

Several experiments in Psycholinguistics found evidences of Iterative Coercion, an effect related to the reanalysis of punctual events used in durative contexts triggering an iterative meaning. We argue that this effect is not related to aspectual features, and that event-duration semantics is accessed during Sentence Processing. We ran a self-paced reading experiment in Brazilian Portuguese whose sentences contain events with an average duration of a few minutes. These sentences were inserted in durative contexts that became the experiment’s conditions following a Latin Square design: control condition (minutes), subtractive (seconds), iterative (hours) and habitual (days). Higher RTs were measured at the critical segments of all experimental conditions, except for the habitual context. The results corroborated our hypothesis while defying the psychological reality of habitual coercion. To better observe the habitual coercion condition, we now present a reanalysis of Sampaio et al. (2014) data. The present analysis confirms the results of our tests.***Semântica da duração de eventos no processamento online de sentenças***Diversos experimentos psicolinguísticos encontraram evidências da CoerçãoIterativa, um efeito relacionado à reanálise de eventos pontuais usados emcontextos durativos, que resultam numa leitura iterativa. Nesse trabalho argumentamos que esse efeito não é relacionado a propriedades aspectuais e que a semântica da duração dos eventos é acessada online. Aplicamos um experimento de leitura auto-monitorada em Português Brasileiro, cujas sentenças contém eventos com duração média de alguns minutos. Estas sentenças foram inseridas em quatro condições durativas, seguindo uma distribuição fatorial (quadrado latino):condição controle (minutos), subtrativa (segundos), iterativa (horas) e habitual (dias). Nossos resultados indicam maiores RTs nos segmentos críticos das condições experimentais, exceto em relação a condição habitual. Esses resultados confirmam nossa hipótese, porém, põem em cheque a realidade psicológica da coerção habitual. Assim, para melhor observar os efeitos dessa condição, procedemos uma reanálise dos dados de Sampaio et al. (2014), que finalmente veio confirmar o resultado de nosso teste.

The time course of processing perfective and imperfective aspect in Polish

This paper is a contribution to a long-standing discussion related to the domain of aspectual interpretation. More precisely, it focuses on the impact of the degree of specificity and morphological complexity on the time course of processing of perfective (prefixed perfective and semelfactive perfective) and imperfective (simple imperfective and iterative imperfective) verbs in Polish. In two experiments, eye-tracking during reading and self-paced reading, we tested a hypothesis based on Frisson & Pickering (1999), Pickering & Frisson (2001), and Frisson (2009) that the interpretation of semantically underspecified verbs should be delayed to the end of a sentence. As predicted, in both of the reported experiments significantly longer reading measures were observed for aspectually underspecified simple imperfective verbs as compared to aspectually more specific perfective verbs in the sentence-final region. Our second major prediction was that morphological complexity of aspectual forms should cause computational cost directly on the verbal region. As predicted, significantly longer reading times were observed on morphologically complex (prefixed) perfective verbs and (suffixed) semelfactive perfective verbs as compared to their morphologically simple imperfective counterparts in the eye-tracking experiment. This effect was not confirmed in the self-paced reading experiment. This difference between the results in the two reported experiments is attributed to the differences between the methods used.

The real-time processing of pragmatics: An experimental psychological-conversation analytic study of obwohl clauses in spoken German

This paper answers calls in the literature for research representing a fusion of the methodologies of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Experimental Psychology (EP). A review of CA literature on German obwohl ‘although’-subordinate clauses suggests that their interactional meaning is a function of their word order, with verb-final word order indicating a concessive function and verb-second word order indicating a correction of the main clause's meaning. A self-paced reading experiment, with German native speakers (n = 48) and with stimuli drawn from actual German conversational data, was designed to test the aforementioned findings of the CA literature under controlled conditions. The experiment was designed to allow for direct measurement of the effect of pragmatics, as encoded through word order, upon real-time sentence processing. Results of the experiment suggest that the CA-derived interactional meanings of obwohl-initial subordinate clauses fully account for the performance of participants in the experiment. The paper shows that findings derived from CA studies can also be observed under the controlled conditions of a self-paced reading study, and that discourse-length utterances taken from naturally-occurring interaction can serve with little modification as stimuli in sentence processing studies investigating pragmatics.

The pragmatics of descriptive and metalinguistic negation: experimental data from French

The phenomenon of descriptive and metalinguistic negation has been debated for a long time from a theoretical perspective. On the one hand, there are defenders of the ambiguist approach to negation, in which the descriptive negation basically serves to deny an utterance’s propositional content, and that this takes place by default (Horn 1985; 1989; Burton-Roberts 1989), while the metalinguistic negation surfaces only when the descriptive negation cannot be applied, and targets the non-truth-conditional contents of the utterance (e.g. implicatures, its register, its morphology or its phonology). Only the former is truth-functional, and the latter is claimed to be non-truth-functional as it does not operate on propositions. On the other hand, there are proponents of the non-ambiguist approach, who maintain that both types of negation are truth-functional since, in the case of metalinguistic negation, the process of pragmatic enrichment guarantees that the full proposition on which negation can operate will be reached (Carston 1996; 2002; Noh 1998; 2000; Moeschler 2010; 2013; 2017). Regarding processing, the ambiguist account predicts that it will take more time to treat metalinguistic negation because it always occurs as the second of two steps; in contrast, the non-ambiguist account makes no such prediction, since the interpretation of negation is contextually driven and the right context will issue the correct interpretation from the start. This paper will be devoted to the presentation of two self-paced reading experiments and of one offline elicitation experiment we carried out on French descriptive and metalinguistic negation. Our findings provide evidence in favor of the non-ambiguist approach.

O papel do conhecimento de eventos no processamento de sentenças isoladas

O presente artigo tem como objetivo investigar o papel do conhecimento de eventos no processamento linguístico. Evidências empíricas obtidas através de estudos em psicolinguística argumentam que o conhecimento de eventos faz parte de uma coleção de pistas pragmáticas que impactam o processo de compreensão da linguagem. No entanto, o experimento de leitura autocadenciada que conduzimos para investigar a questão não registra qualquer efeito nesse sentido, indicando que o conhecimento de evento, se acessado, não influenciou o processamento de palavras específicas em sentenças isoladas e de contexto preditivo. Considerando que tal resultado contraria uma série de achados prévios, argumentamos que (a) a natureza do efeito documentado por estudos anteriores precisa ser melhor explicada e explorada; (b) o modo de apresentação dos itens experimentais pode levar à adoção de estratégias distintas de processamento, o que explicaria a divergência de resultados; (c) algumas técnicas como leitura autocadenciada podem não ser sensíveis para captar o mesmo efeito registrado por meio de outros paradigmas. Embora a segunda explicação pareça mais razoável para dar conta de nossos dados, apenas futuras pesquisas poderão decidir pela sua validade.

Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement.

Long-distance verb-argument dependencies generally require the integration of a fronted argument when the verb is encountered for sentence interpretation. Under a parsing model that handles long-distance dependencies through a cue-based retrieval mechanism, retrieval is hampered when retrieval cues also resonate with non-target elements (retrieval interference). However, similarity-based interference may also stem from interference arising during the encoding of elements in memory (encoding interference), an effect that is not directly accountable for by a cue-based retrieval mechanism. Although encoding and retrieval interference are clearly distinct at the theoretical level, it is difficult to disentangle the two on empirical grounds, since encoding interference may also manifest at the retrieval region. We report two self-paced reading experiments aimed at teasing apart the role of each component in gender and number subject-verb agreement in Italian and English object relative clauses. In Italian, the verb does not agree in gender with the subject, thus providing no cue for retrieval. In English, although present tense verbs agree in number with the subject, past tense verbs do not, allowing us to test the role of number as a retrieval cue within the same language. Results from both experiments converge, showing similarity-based interference at encoding, and some evidence for an effect at retrieval. After having pointed out the non-negligible role of encoding in sentence comprehension, and noting that Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) ACT-R model of sentence processing, the most fully developed cue-based retrieval approach to sentence processing does not predict encoding effects, we propose an augmentation of this model that predicts these effects. We then also propose a self-organizing sentence processing model (SOSP), which has the advantage of accounting for retrieval and encoding interference with a single mechanism.

Backward Dependencies and in-Situ wh-Questions as Test Cases on How to Approach Experimental Linguistics Research That Pursues Theoretical Linguistics Questions.

The empirical study of language is a young field in contemporary linguistics. This being the case, and following a natural development process, the field is currently at a stage where different research methods and experimental approaches are being put into question in terms of their validity. Without pretending to provide an answer with respect to the best way to conduct linguistics related experimental research, in this article we aim at examining the process that researchers follow in the design and implementation of experimental linguistics research with a goal to validate specific theoretical linguistic analyses. First, we discuss the general challenges that experimental work faces in finding a compromise between addressing theoretically relevant questions and being able to implement these questions in a specific controlled experimental paradigm. We discuss the Granularity Mismatch Problem (Poeppel and Embick, 2005) which addresses the challenges that research that is trying to bridge the representations and computations of language and their psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic evidence faces, and the basic assumptions that interdisciplinary research needs to consider due to the different conceptual granularity of the objects under study. To illustrate the practical implications of the points addressed, we compare two approaches to perform linguistic experimental research by reviewing a number of our own studies strongly grounded on theoretically informed questions. First, we show how linguistic phenomena similar at a conceptual level can be tested within the same language using measurement of event-related potentials (ERP) by discussing results from two ERP experiments on the processing of long-distance backward dependencies that involve coreference and negative polarity items respectively in Dutch. Second, we examine how the same linguistic phenomenon can be tested in different languages using reading time measures by discussing the outcome of four self-paced reading experiments on the processing of in-situ wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese and French. Finally, we review the implications that our findings have for the specific theoretical linguistics questions that we originally aimed to address. We conclude with an overview of the general insights that can be gained from the role of structural hierarchy and grammatical constraints in processing and the existing limitations on the generalization of results.