Sentence Acceptability Judgment Research Articles

A self-paced reading study of context effects in the processing of aspectual verbs in Mandarin

Abstract Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb’s complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai et al., 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online and the timecourse of context effects remain unclear, but in our view it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e., descriptions of the utterance context used to infer the salient reading of the utterance. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in a self-paced reading study to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline task, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time.

THE EFFECTS OF AGE, PRESENTATION MODE (ONLINE, OFFLINE), AND SEGMENTATION OF AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES ON ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES OF FEMALE EFL LEARNERS

One kind of structural ambiguity is in sentences including two determiner phrases (DP) that are followed by a relative clause (RC). One example of this type of ambiguity is "Somebody shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony". Speakers of different languages attribute RC either to DP1 or DP2. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between participants' age and participants' attachment preferences, as well as different ways of presenting the material (i.e., offline vs. online) on the attachment preferences. This study also aims to see if the segmentation of experimental sentences plays any role in participant attachment preferences. To this end, a sample of 50 female native speakers of Persian ranging between 15 to 25 years participated in this study. The instruments used in the present research include an offline sentence acceptability judgment test and main tests that included the first main test, offline test, online complete presentation (timed), and an online segment-by-segment sentence. For the analysis of data t-tests and ANOVA were used. The statistics showed that participants' age affects attachment preferences, and adolescents have a tendency toward DP1 selection. Different modes of presenting ambiguous sentences also affected the results; presenting materials in a self-paced online method leads to a significant difference other two modes. Finally, segmentation plays a role in the attachment preference of RC and in resolving ambiguous sentences. The results showed that students had a preference for segmented presentation rather than a holistic mode of presentation.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0029/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Methodologies for assessing morphosyntactic ability in people with Alzheimer's disease.

The detection and description of language impairments in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's Disease (AD) play an important role in research, clinical diagnosis and intervention. Various methodological protocols have been implemented for the assessment of morphosyntactic abilities in AD; narrative discourse elicitation tasks and structured experimental tasks for production, offline and online structured experimental tasks for comprehension. Very few studies implement and compare different methodological protocols; thus, little is known about the advantages and disadvantages of each methodology. To discuss and compare the main behavioral methodological approaches and tasks that have been used in psycholinguistic research to assess different aspects of morphosyntactic production and comprehension in individuals with AD at the word and sentence levels. A narrative review was conducted through searches in the scientific databases Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct, MITCogNet, PubMed. Only studies written in English, that reported quantitative data and were published in peer-reviewed journals were considered with respect to their methodological protocol. Moreover, we considered studies that reported research on all stages of the disease and we included only studies that also reported results of a healthy control group. Studies that implemented standardized assessment tools were not considered in this review. The main narrative discourse elicitation tasks implemented for the assessment of morphosyntactic production include interviews, picture-description and story narration, whereas the main structured experimental tasks include sentence completion, constrained sentence production, sentence repetition and naming. Morphosyntactic comprehension in AD has been assessed with the use of structured experimental tasks, both offline (sentence-picture matching, grammaticality judgment) and online (cross-modal naming,speeded sentence acceptability judgment, auditory moving window, word detection, reading). For each task we considered studies that reported results from different morphosyntactic structures and phenomena in as many different languages as possible. Our review revealed strengths and weaknesses of these methods but also directions for future research. Narrative discourse elicitation tasks as well as structured experimental tasks have been used in a variety of languages, and have uncovered preserved morphosyntactic production but also deficits in people with AD. A combination of narrative discourse elicitation and structured production tasks for the assessment of the same morphosyntactic structure has been rarely used. Regarding comprehension, offline tasks have been implemented in various languages, whereas online tasks have been mainly used in English. Offline and online experimental paradigms have often produced contradictory results even within the same study. The discrepancy between the two paradigms has been attributed to the different working memory demands they impose to the comprehender or to the different parsing processes they tap. Strengths and shortcomings of each methodology are summarized in the paper, and comparisons between different tasks are attempted when this is possible. Thus, the paper may serve as a methodological guide for the study of morphosyntax in AD and possibly in other neurodegenerative diseases. What is already known on this subject For the assessment of morphosyntactic abilities in AD, various methodological paradigms have been implemented: narrative discourse elicitation tasks and structured experimental tasks for production, and offline and online structured experimental tasks for comprehension. Very few studies implement and compare different methodological protocols; thus, little is known about the advantages and disadvantages of each methodology. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The paper presents an overview of methodologies that have been used to assess morphosyntactic production and comprehension of people with AD at the word and sentence levels. The paper summarizes the strengths and shortcomings of each methodology, providing both the researcher and the clinician with some directions in their endeavour of investigating language in AD. Also, the paper highlights the need for further research that will implement carefully scrutinized tasks from various experimental paradigms and will explore distinct aspects of the AD patients' morphosyntactic abilities in typologically different languages. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The paper may serve as a reference point for (psycho-)linguists who wish to study morphosyntactic abilities in AD, and for speech and language therapists who might need to apply morphosyntactic protocols to their patients in order to assess them or design appropriate therapeutic interventions for production and comprehension deficits.

Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

Naturalistic Double Modals in North America

Double modals are a well-known nonstandard feature of some regional varieties of English in North America, but due to their rareness in spoken language, questions remain as to the inventory of possible combinatorial types and the geographic extent of their use in contemporary naturalistic speech. This study investigates double modals in the Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE), a 1.2-billion-word corpus of time-stamped and geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) YouTube transcripts from the United States and Canada. Double modal sequences were identified in the corpus using regular expressions, then verified via manual examination of videos. The study represents the first large-scale, continent-wide analysis of double modals based entirely on recent naturalistic production data, rather than data such as elicited responses or sentence acceptability judgments, and it demonstrates a larger double modal inventory and a broader geographic range of use for the feature than has previously been documented, including in Canada.

Vocabulary Repetition Following Multisensory Instruction Is Ineffective on L2 Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the N400.

Putting the principles of multisensory teaching into practice, this study investigated the effect of audio-visual vocabulary repetition on L2 sentence comprehension. Forty participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A sensory-based model of instruction (i.e., emotioncy) was used to teach a list of unfamiliar vocabularies to the two groups. Following the instruction, the experimental group repeated the instructed words twice, while the control group received no vocabulary repetition. Afterward, their electrophysiological neural activities were recorded through electroencephalography while doing a sentence acceptability judgment task with 216 sentences under acceptable (correct) and unacceptable (pragmatically violated) conditions. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and a Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVA were used to compare the behavioral and neurocognitive responses [N400 as the main language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effect] of the two groups. The results showed no significant N400 amplitude difference in favor of any of the groups. The findings corroborated the ineffectiveness of two repetitions preceded by multisensory instruction on L2 sentence comprehension.

Naturalistic Double Modals in North America

Double modals are a well-known nonstandard feature of some regional varieties of English in North America, but due to their rareness in spoken language, questions remain as to the inventory of possible combinatorial types and the geographic extent of their use in contemporary naturalistic speech. This study investigates double modals in the Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE), a 1.2-billion-word corpus of time-stamped and geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) YouTube transcripts from the United States and Canada. Double modal sequences were identified in the corpus using regular expressions, then verified via manual examination of videos. The study represents the first large-scale, continent-wide analysis of double modals based entirely on recent naturalistic production data, rather than data such as elicited responses or sentence acceptability judgments, and it demonstrates a larger double modal inventory and a broader geographic range of use for the feature than has previously been documented, including in Canada.

Online sentence processing impairments in agrammatic and logopenic primary progressive aphasia: Evidence from ERP

Evidence from psycholinguistic research indicates that sentence processing is impaired in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), and more so in individuals with agrammatic (PPA-G) than logopenic (PPA-L) subtypes. Studies have mostly focused on offline sentence production ability, reporting impaired production of verb morphology (e.g., tense, agreement) and verb-argument structure (VAS) in PPA-G, and mixed findings in PPA-L. However, little is known about real-time sentence comprehension in PPA. The present study is the first to compare real-time semantic, morphosyntactic and VAS processing in individuals with PPA (10 with PPA-G and 9 with PPA-L), and in two groups of healthy (22 young and 19 older) individuals, using event-related potentials (ERP). Participants were instructed to listen to sentences that were either well-formed (n = 150) or contained a violation of semantics (e.g., *Owen was mentoring pumpkins at the party, n = 50), morphosyntax (e.g., *The actors was singing in the theatre, n = 50) or VAS (*Ryan was devouring on the couch, n = 50), and were required to perform a sentence acceptability judgment task while EEG was recorded. Results indicated that in the semantic task both healthy and PPA groups showed an N400 response to semantic violations, which was delayed in PPA and older (vs. younger) groups. Morphosyntactic violations elicited a P600 in both groups of healthy individuals and in PPA-L, but not in PPA-G. A similar P600 response was also found only in healthy individuals for VAS violations; whereas, abnormal ERP responses were observed in both PPA groups, with PPA-G showing no evidence of VAS violation detection and PPA-L showing a delayed and abnormally-distributed positive component that was negatively associated with offline sentence comprehension scores. These findings support characterizations of sentence processing impairments in PPA-G, by providing online evidence that VAS and morphosyntactic processing are impaired, in the face of substantially preserved semantic processing. In addition, the results indicate that on-line processing of VAS information may also be impaired in PPA-L, despite their near-normal accuracy on standardized language tests of argument structure production.

Homophone Advantage in Sentence Acceptability Judgment: An Experiment with Japanese Kanji Words and Articulatory Suppression Technique

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its homophone word than non-homophonic sentences. In the latter, the word was replaced by a non-homophone spelling control; that is, we observed a homophone advantage. Participants were able to identify the correct word easily through foil's homophonic mate. This indicated that activated phonology played a role in the Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task and it contributed to the error detection/recovery process. Another important finding was that the homophone facilitation effect remained under articulatory suppression. It confirmed that phonology was activated at an early stage as abstract, non-articulatory phonology.

Split intransitivity in Japanese is syntactic: Evidence for the Unaccusative Hypothesis from sentence acceptability and truth value judgment experiments

Split intransitivity (SI) is the generalization that intransitive verbs form two subclasses: the subjects of some intransitives behave like direct objects of transitive verbs, whereas the subjects of other intransitives behave like transitive subjects. The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) accounts for SI syntactically, arguing that the subjects of some intransitives (unaccusatives) are initially internal arguments, just like transitive objects, while the subjects of other intransitives (unergatives) are true subjects, just like transitive subjects. The UH has been enormously influential and inspired a rich and diverse literature on SI, including many recent experimental studies. Yet, no conclusive evidence for or against the UH has been put forward, largely because SI diagnostics (SIDs) – phenomena that motivate SI – are often amenable to both syntactic and non-syntactic analyses. In order to present unequivocal evidence for the UH, therefore, SIDs that make crucial reference to the UH must be carefully identified and studied. This study argues that two Japanese SIDs, quantifier scope and floating numeral quantifier licensing (FNQ-licensing), are such SIDs, as (i) they make crucial reference to the UH and the putative syntactic difference between unaccusative and unergative subjects, and (ii) they reliably classify Japanese intransitive verbs into two subclasses because of a syntactic difference. The evidence for this claim comes from the results of truth value judgment and sentence acceptability judgment experiments. The study argues that the results of these experiments show that Japanese intransitive verbs form two subclasses because of a syntactic difference, supporting the UH.

English Learners’ Acceptability to Nuclear Stress Rule on Postverbal PPs in Chinese

This study examines English learners’ acceptability to the Nuclear Stress Rule(NSR) on postverbal prepositional phrases in Chinese and provides a piece of evidence to prove that the NSR active at phonology-syntax interface is difficult for English students learning Chinese (L1-English L2-Chinese learners) to acquire. The result from sentence acceptability judgment task shows that L1-English L2-Chinese learners and Chinese native speakers perform significantly differently in three out of four conditions of postverbal PPs. English native speakers rely on their L1 transfer to judge the acceptability of sentences in Chinese. Therefore they are likely to accept grammatical sentences which are prosodically unacceptable to native speakers. Pedagogically speaking, L2 learners need to be instructed in terms of negative inputs in order to acquire this property.

V1-le vs. RVC-le in expressing resultant state in learners’ Mandarin interlanguage: evidence of two states of mind?

V1-le vs. RVC-le in expressing resultant state in learners’ Mandarin interlanguage: evidence of two states of mind?

THE EFFECTS OF SYNTACTIC KNOWLEDGE AND EXTRA-GRAMMATICAL FACTORS ON SENTENCE ACCEPTABILITY JUDGMENT: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON CHINESE TOPIC CONSTRUCTIONS

In this study, we explore how different components like syntactic knowledge and discourse context may interact with each other in sentence acceptability judgment performance. We examined the acceptability judgment patterns on Chinese topic constructions in different contexts and we also looked at how different types of topic NPs (definite topic NPs vs. bare topic NPs) may affect the judgment patterns. Our findings show that island-obeying topic sentences were consistently judged better than their island-violating counterparts, whether presented in a null context or in a relevant context. This contrast suggests that discourse context and syntactic knowledge do not interact in sentence acceptability judgment performance, and favors a categorical approach to grammar. In addition, our findings also show that topic sentences with a definite topic NP were consistently rated better than those with a bare topic NP, and that canonical sentences which served as the baseline were also consistently judged to be better than grammatical topic sentences. These patterns suggest that acceptability judgment is continuous with a wider range of variations due to the ambiguity, frequency, and processing complexity involved in the given sentences. Overall, our study not only suggests that the traditional acceptability judgment task can elicit good data about grammaticality, but it also recognizes that extra-grammatical factors can affect acceptability judgment performance and should therefore be taken into consideration to ensure the quality of the collected data.

Deaf Students’ Knowledge of Subtle Lexical Properties of Transitive and Intransitive English Verbs

Deaf learners' acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two English proficiency levels, plus a control group of hearing native English speakers. Hypotheses addressed the influence of relative derivational complexity and overall English proficiency on verb acquisition. Though the hearing group showed greater accuracy in sentence acceptability judgments and greater accuracy tied to overall English proficiency, the two deaf groups displayed fairly robust knowledge of targeted verbs' fundamental transitive and intransitive lexical properties. Nevertheless, verb acquisition remains a formidable challenge. Further research should assess deaf students' knowledge of these lexical properties in lower-frequency English verbs, including unaccusative verbs prevalent in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and other academic discourse.

Processing temporal agreement in a tenseless language: An ERP study of Mandarin Chinese

Human languages are equipped with an impressive repertoire of time-encoding devices which vary significantly across different cultures. Previous research on temporal processing has focused on morphosyntactic processes in Indo-European languages. This study investigated the neural correlates of temporal processing in Mandarin Chinese, a language that is not morphologically marked for tense. In a sentence acceptability judgment task, we manipulated the agreement between semantically enriched temporal adverbs or a highly grammaticalized aspectual particle (-guo) and temporal noun phrases. Disagreement of both the temporal adverbs and the aspectual particle elicited a centro-parietal P600 effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) whereas only disagreeing temporal adverbs evoked an additional broadly distributed N400 effect. Moreover, a sustained negativity effect was observed on both the words following the critical ones and the last words in sentences with temporal disagreement. These results reveal both commonalities and differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages in temporal agreement processing. In particular, we demonstrate that temporal reference in Chinese relies on both lexical semantics and morphosyntactic processes and that the level of grammaticalization of linguistic devices representing similar temporal information is reflected in differential ERP responses.

Metalinguistic judgments in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

This study compared sentence acceptability judgments from young and healthy older adults and older adults with dementia due to probable Alzheimer's disease. Two types of sentences were contrasted: one type involved contrasts among verb alternations in which semantic distinctions between verbs regulate the acceptability of phrase structure variations; the second type involved contrasts among directional transformations in which constraints on the movement of noun phrases determine the linear order of main and embedded clauses. The primary findings were that metalinguistic judgments by healthy older adults as well as those with probable Alzheimer's reflected processing demands on working memory. In addition, metalinguistic judgments by adults with probable Alzheimer's reflected the breakdown of semantic information about verbs.

Working memory and on-line sentence comprehension in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

We examined the ability of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and normal controls to perform a sentence acceptability judgment task that required determining the referent for a reflexive pronoun. Performance on three different sentence types that differed in terms of syntactic complexity was assessed. Subjects performed the task alone and under two different dual-task conditions which required continuous, externally paced responses. DAT patients were more affected than controls by the dual-task conditions, but were not disproportionately impaired on the more complex sentence types. The failure of DAT patients to be disproportionately affected on the most complex sentence types in the dual-task conditions provides evidence for the separation of the processing resources that are used in sentence comprehension from those involved in other tasks.

Water is Not H 2O

What makes a liquid water? A strong version of "psychological essentialism" predicts that people use the presence or absence of H 2O as the primary determinant of what liquids they call "water." To test this prediction, subjects were asked to judge the amount of H 2O in liquids called "water" and liquids not called "water." Neither their beliefs about the simple presence/absence of H 2O nor about the proportion of H 2O in the liquids accounted well for which ones are normally called "water." Typicality ratings and an extended tree solution on similarity ratings suggested that use, location, and source of a liquid may also influence whether it is considered to be water. Sentence acceptability judgments further suggested that there may be a sense of "water" that corresponds to the strong essentialist view, but that there is also a more general sense in common use encompassing mixtures with varying amounts of H 2O. These findings indicate that essentialist beliefs alone may not fully explain category membership judgments and word use, and they suggest a modified version of psychological essentialism.

Intraindividual differences in levels of language in comprehension of written sentences

An experiment requiring sentence acceptability judgments was administered to second, fourth, and sixth graders. Sentences contained only real words, one of which might be an orthographic foil differing from a real word by just one letter. Mode of sentence presentation was manipulated to focus the reader's attention on different levels of language—the single word or the sentence unit. Results were analyzed for both the group and individuals. Individual subject analyses showed that intraindividual differences in levels of written language occurred at all grade levels: 60% of the subjects had at least one dissociation between the word and sentence level. Some dissociations reflected temporary superiority of one level of language, while others reflected more stable superiority of one level of language at a particular time in reading development. A psychometric study provided converging evidence for dissociations between word and sentence level skills in reading. Although double dissociations occurred (word superior to sentence level and sentence superior to word level), dissociations in which word level skills were superior to sentence level skills were more common in first through sixth grades on the psychometric measures. Implications of intraindividual differences in levels of language for reading theory are discussed.

Ontological knowledge and sentence anomaly

According to Keil (1979) , there is a hierarchical one-to-one mapping of the predicate—term relations of language onto the basic structure of knowledge. An attempt was made to replicate and extend Keil's study of the effects of ontological knowledge on judgments of sentence acceptability. In the present study, subjects were presented with wider ranges of stimuli and instructions than those used by Keil. Overall, subjects failed to make sentence acceptability judgments that accord with Keil's formulation. Even in the stimulus condition most closely approximating that used by Keil, subjects accepted sentences that his theory identifies as anomalous. The data suggests that terms referring to objects and terms referring to events cannot be located unambiguously within a single hierarchy. The results of the study further suggest that the range of sentence interpretation exceeds the limits of a rigid hierarchical system.