Sentence-final Verbs Research Articles

Role of prosody and word order in identifying focus: evidence from pupillometry

ABSTRACT This study investigated the role of prosody and word order in identifying the focus of sentences in Japanese. Native Japanese speakers listened to sentences with different types of word order (subject–object–verb (SOV) vs. object–subject–verb (OSV)), prosody (whether the first noun phrase is stressed or not) and preceding contexts (object- vs. subject-wh questions), while processing costs were measured using pupillometry. Although syntactically non-basic OSV was more difficult to process than basic SOV, this processing difficulty was considerably reduced when the supportive context (the subject-wh question) required S to be focused. The time–course analysis of pupillometry revealed that the Japanese speakers immediately used prosodic cues to determine the focus of sentences, but the effect of word order cues for focus was delayed until the sentence-final verb was encountered. This study advances our understanding of the temporal dynamics of focus processing and the interplay between syntactic and information structures in sentence comprehension.

The wrong horse was bet on: the effects of argument structure versus argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic sentences.

Psycholinguistic research remains puzzled about the circumstances under which syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. There is an abundance of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies that have examined which factors may determine why some idioms are more syntactically fixed than others, including transparency, compositionality, and syntactic frozenness; however, they have returned inconclusive, sometimes even conflicting, results. This is the first study to examine argument structure (i.e., the number of arguments a verb takes) and argument adjacency (i.e., the position of the critical arguments relative to the verb) and their effects on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German. Our results suggest that neither the traditional models of idiom processing (according to which idioms are stored as fixed entries) nor more recent hybrid theories (which concede some compositional handling in addition to a fixed entry) adequately account for the effects of argument structure or argument adjacency. Therefore, this study challenges existing models of idiom processing. In two sentence-completion experiments, participants listened to idiomatic and literal sentences in both active and passive voice without the sentence-final verb. They indicated which of three visually-presented verbs best completed the sentence. We manipulated the factor argument structure within experiments and argument adjacency across experiments. In Experiment 1, passivized three-argument sentences had the critical argument adjacent to the verb while two-argument sentences had the critical argument non-adjacent to the verb, and vice versa in Experiment 2. In both experiments, voice interacted with argument structure. Active sentences-both literal and idiomatic-showed equivalent processing of two- and three-argument sentences. However, passive sentences returned contrasting effects. In Experiment 1, three-argument sentences were processed faster than two-argument sentences and vice versa in Experiment 2. This pattern corresponds to faster processing when critical arguments are adjacent than non-adjacent. The results point to the dominant role of argument adjacency over the number of arguments in the processing of syntactically transformed sentences. Regarding idiom processing, we conclude that the adjacency of the verb to its critical arguments determines whether passivized idioms keep their figurative meaning and present the implications of this finding for relevant models of idiom processing.

Electrophysiological evidence for a subject-first strategy in visually situated auditory sentence processing in Korean

This study investigated a subject-first strategy in prediction mechanism in visually situated sentence processing in Korean, using event-related potentials (ERPs). According to the subject-first strategy, parsers tend to generate sentences conforming to canonical sentence word order (i.e., SOV in Korean), subject-first sentence, mapping conceptually more prominent referent such as agent of the event on the subject position of the sentence. Therefore, in the predictive mechanism of language comprehension, the subject is pre-activated and anticipated for the first NP of the sentence at the initial phase of bottom-up language processing. This study tested this subject-first strategy in Korean by examining brain responses to object-initial sentences (OV) compared with subject-initial sentences (SV) under the context of clear thematic role relations set by a visual image. The results of an ERP experiment with 30 native Korean speakers identified neural effects for object-initial sentences compared with subject-initial sentences at the NP and Verb, reflecting a conflict between the pre-activated representation in the parser's mind and the encountered bottom-up input. An N400 effect was elicited at the NP, as early as at the noun, not at the following object case marker. Late frontal positivity (LFP) was also found in the sentence-final verb, proving the processing difficulty of non-canonical object-initial sentences compared with canonical subject-initial sentences. These results indicate that Korean native speakers build linguistic representation conforming to a canonical sentence in SOV language in the predictive mechanism supporting subject-first strategy but revise the predicted event structure rapidly upon newly encountering input.

Mind your weight: ‘Motionlessly’ sitting between the object and the verb in Japanese

The object in Japanese is often displaced from its canonical position next to the sentence-final verb, due to motivations such as information structure or animacy. Such flexibility allows for an adverb to be placed between the object and the verb. In the literature, there are suggestions for an almost equal preference to place Japanese manner adverbs before or after the object, inferred from both online and offline results. We will present a corpus study with a representative Japanese manner adverb zitto ‘motionlessly’ to show that either order may be preferred in different accounts of word order variation, but none can satisfy both requirements of distance minimization and accessibility, which are manifested in competing directions in Japanese, a verb-final language. In both accounts, weight has immense effect and should not be neglected. By using two heuristic methods to measure the weight effect, we propose that this case study with an object and an adverb sheds new light on the explanatory power of the distance minimization account, in particular by the Mimimize Domains principle (Hawkins 1994), which operates at both levels of (1) the constituency construction of the full VP, which favors the object-first order, and (2) the Phrasal Combination Domain between the head of object and the verb, which favors the adverb-first order. It is also proposed to implement a complement-and-adjunct distinction in the MiD principle, as a step toward a more effective study method of weight effect which I shall call efficiency profiling.

Polarity adverbs facilitate predictive processing in L2 Japanese

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs – zenzen ‘at all’ and amari ‘(not) very’ – as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by these adverbs, generate predictions of the polarity of the sentence-final verb. The visual-world paradigm experiment revealed that both native-speaker and L2-learner groups looked progressively more at the target picture before the negated verb when the information from adverbs was available than when it was not. The pattern of results underscores the usefulness of adverbial polarity items as predictive cues and indicates that they expedite the processing of negation in Japanese. Learners successfully exploited this information to generate nativelike predictions on sentence meaning.

Incremental structure building of preverbal PPs in Dutch

Abstract Incremental comprehension of head-final constructions can reveal structural attachment preferences for ambiguous phrases. This study investigates how temporarily ambiguous PPs are processed in Dutch verb-final constructions. In De aannemer heeft op het dakterras bespaard/gewerkt ‘The contractor has on the roof terrace saved/worked’, the PP is locally ambiguous between attachment as argument and as adjunct. This ambiguity is resolved by the sentence-final verb. In a self-paced reading task, we manipulated the argument/adjunct status of the PP, and its position relative to the verb. While we found no reading-time differences between argument and adjunct PPs, we did find that transitive verbs, for which the PP is an argument, were read more slowly than intransitive verbs, for which the PP is an adjunct. We suggest that Dutch parsers have a preference for adjunct attachment of preverbal PPs, and discuss our findings in terms of incremental parsing models that aim to minimize costly reanalysis.

Beyond linear order: The role of argument structure in speaking

The current study examines how speakers plan sentences in which two words that form hierarchical dependency relationships - arguments and verbs - appear far apart in linear distance, to investigate how linear and hierarchical aspects of sentences simultaneously shape sentence planning processes. The results of six extended picture-word interference experiments suggest that speakers retrieve sentence-final verbs before the articulation of their sentence-initial patient or theme arguments, but not agent arguments, and before retrieving sentence-medial nouns inside modifiers. These results suggest that the time-course of sentence planning reflects hierarchically-defined dependency relationships over and above linear structure.

What matters in processing German object relative clauses in aphasia – timing or morpho-syntactic cues?

ABSTRACT Background It is a well-established finding that individuals with aphasia have difficulties in using morpho-syntactic cues to determine the meaning of non-canonical sentences, such as object relative clauses (ORCs). While non-brain-damaged speakers can process ORCs disambiguated through unambiguous case marking more easily than number marking (i.e. subject-verb agreement), there is still much debate concerning the varying impact of case and number cues on sentence processing in aphasia. Aims The objective of the present study is to investigate the use of case and number marking as cues to sentence interpretation and to test the predictions of the Relativized Minimality approach. Within this account, dissimilarity in the number specification of the subject and object is assumed to facilitate ORC processing in aphasia, while case is not. Methods & Procedures Combining the visual-world eye-tracking methodology with an auditory referent-identification task, we measured offline and online sentence processing in German-speaking individuals with aphasia and in a group of control participants. ORCs were disambiguated through case or number marking, whereby case occurred at different points of disambiguation: case marking at (1) the relative pronoun, (2) the following noun phrase, or (3) number marking on the sentence-final verb. Thereby, we were able to control for number dissimilarity of the subject and object in ORCs, with number specification being similar in case-marked ORCs and dissimilar in number-marked ORCs. Outcome & Results We found that both participant groups exhibit a general processing advantage for case- over number-disambiguated ORCs. Moreover, case-marked ORCs disambiguated at different positions within the sentence were processed similarly in term of accuracy, reaction times or online processing speed. Conclusions These results support the assumption that case marking can be used more successfully to derive sentence meaning as compared to number marking – regardless of the timing of disambiguation. Future research is needed to further disentangle the status of case and number in the computation of Minimality.

Speech Planning at Turn Transitions in Dialog Is Associated With Increased Processing Load.

Speech planning is a sophisticated process. In dialog, it regularly starts in overlap with an incoming turn by a conversation partner. We show that planning spoken responses in overlap with incoming turns is associated with higher processing load than planning in silence. In a dialogic experiment, participants took turns with a confederate describing lists of objects. The confederate's utterances (to which participants responded) were pre-recorded and varied in whether they ended in a verb or an object noun and whether this ending was predictable or not. We found that response planning in overlap with sentence-final verbs evokes larger task-evoked pupillary responses, while end predictability had no effect. This finding indicates that planning in overlap leads to higher processing load for next speakers in dialog and that next speakers do not proactively modulate the time course of their response planning based on their predictions of turn endings. The turn-taking system exerts pressure on the language processing system by pushing speakers to plan in overlap despite the ensuing increase in processing load.

Semantic composition of sentences word by word: MEG evidence for shared processing of conceptual and logical elements

Human language is a mixture of many types of elements, some clearly conceptual, like dog and run, and others more functional/logical, such as negation or quantificational elements (not, many, all). While theories are emerging for the neurobiology of conceptual combination, the neural mechanisms of integrating concepts with logical information remain largely unstudied. Do neural correlates of concept composition also reflect the composition of concepts with logical elements? In a previous MEG study, we have shown that in noun-noun compounds (e.g., tomato soup), the conceptual specificity of the first word modulates left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) amplitudes elicited on the second word, suggesting an effect of conceptual specificity, or informativeness, on the process of conceptual combination. Here we tested how this pattern is affected by negation, which has the ability to reverse informativeness relations: for example, while poodle is conceptually more informative than dog, no dog negates more possibilities and is therefore more informative than no poodle. We manipulated the informativeness of sentential subjects by fully crossing conceptual specificity (poodle vs. dog) with the presence of negation (no vs. a) to create positive and negative sentences (e.g., no/a-(green)-lizard-is-sleeping) and tested whether the effect of conceptual specificity was reversed for the integration of negative as compared to positive subjects. Exactly this pattern was observed in the LATL and surrounding fronto-temporal cortex during the processing of the sentence-final verb, suggesting a shared mechanism that tracks informativeness in integrating conceptual and logical elements in this network.

Word Order and Voice Influence the Timing of Verb Planning in German Sentence Production.

Theories of incremental sentence production make different assumptions about when speakers encode information about described events and when verbs are selected, accordingly. An eye tracking experiment on German testing the predictions from linear and hierarchical incrementality about the timing of event encoding and verb planning is reported. In the experiment, participants described depictions of two-participant events with sentences that differed in voice and word order. Verb-medial active sentences and actives and passives with sentence-final verbs were compared. Linear incrementality predicts that sentences with verbs placed early differ from verb-final sentences because verbs are assumed to only be planned shortly before they are articulated. By contrast, hierarchical incrementality assumes that speakers start planning with relational encoding of the event. A weak version of hierarchical incrementality assumes that only the action is encoded at the outset of formulation and selection of lexical verbs only occurs shortly before they are articulated, leading to the prediction of different fixation patterns for verb-medial and verb-final sentences. A strong version of hierarchical incrementality predicts no differences between verb-medial and verb-final sentences because it assumes that verbs are always lexically selected early in the formulation process. Based on growth curve analyses of fixations to agent and patient characters in the described pictures, and the influence of character humanness and the lack of an influence of the visual salience of characters on speakers' choice of active or passive voice, the current results suggest that while verb planning does not necessarily occur early during formulation, speakers of German always create an event representation early.

Subliminal enhancement of predictive effects during syntactic processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus: an MEG study.

Predictive syntactic processing plays an essential role in language comprehension. In our previous study using Japanese object-verb (OV) sentences, we showed that the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) responses to a verb increased at 120–140 ms after the verb onset, indicating predictive effects caused by a preceding object. To further elucidate the automaticity of the predictive effects in the present magnetoencephalography study, we examined whether a subliminally presented verb (“subliminal verb”) enhanced the predictive effects on the sentence-final verb (“target verb”) unconsciously, i.e., without awareness. By presenting a subliminal verb after the object, enhanced predictive effects on the target verb would be detected in the OV sentences when the transitivity of the target verb matched with that of the subliminal verb (“congruent condition”), because the subliminal verb just after the object could determine the grammaticality of the sentence. For the OV sentences under the congruent condition, we observed significantly increased left IFG responses at 140–160 ms after the target verb onset. In contrast, responses in the precuneus and midcingulate cortex (MCC) were significantly reduced for the OV sentences under the congruent condition at 110–140 and 280–300 ms, respectively. By using partial Granger causality analyses for the OV sentences under the congruent condition, we revealed a bidirectional interaction between the left IFG and MCC at 60–160 ms, as well as a significant influence from the MCC to the precuneus. These results indicate that a top-down influence from the left IFG to the MCC, and then to the precuneus, is critical in syntactic decisions, whereas the MCC shares its task-set information with the left IFG to achieve automatic and predictive processes of syntax.

Left parietal alpha enhancement during working memory-intensive sentence processing

Both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have shown that verbal working memory plays an important role during sentence processing. There is growing evidence from outside of sentence processing that human alpha oscillations (7–13 Hz) play a critical role in working memory. This study aims to link this to the sentence processing domain. Time-frequency analyses and source localization were performed on electroencephalography (EEG) data that were recorded during the processing of auditorily presented sentences involving either a short or a long distance between an argument (subject or object) and the respective sentence-final verb. We reasoned that oscillatory activity in the alpha band should increase during sentences with longer argument-verb distances, since decreased temporal proximity should result in increased memory demands. When verbal working memory-intensive long-dependency sentences were compared to short-dependency sentences, a sustained oscillatory enhancement at 10 Hz was found during storage prior to the sentence-final verb, turning into a transient power increase in the beta band (13–20 Hz) at the sentence-final verb. The sources of the alpha oscillations were localized to bilaterally occipital and left parietal cortices. Only the source activity in the left parietal cortex was negatively correlated with verbal working memory abilities. These findings indicate that the parsimonious role of alpha oscillations in domain-general working memory can be extended to language, that is, sentence processing. We suggest that the function of left parietal cortex underlying verbal working memory storage during sentence processing is to inhibit the premature release of verbal information that will subsequently be integrated.

Präpositionaladverbien im Erst- und Zweitspracherwerb – Pleonasmen oder Funktionsträger?

Abstract Both German monolingual children and Turkish bilingual children use pleonastic locatives for a certain period of time but they do so for different reasons, as will be shown in this paper. Constructions like Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch drauf, where the spatial relation is signaled twice – in the preposition auf and in the adverb drauf – are grammatically acceptable but are considered somewhat colloquial. It is therefore not surprising that adults in the picture-description task being reported here make no use of the spatial repetition. With the children things are different: Those Turkish L2 learners who start to acquire German at the age of 3 begin by using a semantically unspecified prepositional head for all topological relations (e.g. *Der Apfel ist in/bei Baum/Schale/Tisch instead of Der Apfel ist am Baum/in der Schale/auf dem Tisch). Owing to their mother tongue, it takes them quite long to detect the semantic specification in the input. In particular, stressed and post-final elements attract their attention, and not surprisingly they start using the postpositional spatial adverbs and particles to break through the German prepositional system (e.g. *Das Buch ist in/bei Tisch drauf). Unlike Turkish children, young German native speakers combine these adverbial elements with a full prepositional phrase, but with no functional value. As the data indicate, the pleonastic locative construction appears to be a residue of an earlier developmental stage which involves the splitting of a complex pronominal adverb (e.g. da(d)rauf) and stranding the prepositional part (e.g. Da ist ein Buch drauf). The high frequency of sentence final verb particles in the input (often with identical form and transparent spatial meaning) might produce the preserving effect even though meanwhile the full prepositional phrase is used to express a spatial relation. Already at preschool age German children come to recognize the redundancy and finally drop the adverbial element. Turkish children, however, have to rely on the prepositional adverb – as a supportive and stabilizing „function-carrier“ – until they notice that in German it is the preposition that must carry the specific spatial information. This is subsequently transmitted from the postpositional spatial element to the head of the full prepositional phrase.

Linguistic complexity and information structure in Korean: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded complement sentences; the third experiment additionally examined reading of sentences with object-modifying, object-extracted relative clauses. In Korean, both of these structures place two NPs with nominative case marking early in the sentence, with the embedded and matrix verbs following later. The type (pronoun, name or description) of these two critical NPs was varied in the experiments. When the initial NPs were of the same type, comprehension was slowed after participants had read the sentence-final verbs, a finding that supports the view that working memory in language comprehension is constrained by similarity-based interference during the retrieval of information necessary to determine the syntactic or semantic relations between noun phrases and verb phrases. Ease of comprehension was also influenced by the association between type of NP and syntactic position, with the best performance being observed when more definite NPs (pronouns and names) were in a prominent syntactic position (e.g., matrix subject) and less definite NPs (descriptions) were in a non-prominent syntactic position (embedded subject). This pattern provides evidence that the interpretation of sentences is facilitated by consistent packaging of information in different linguistic elements.

Syntactic persistence in Dutch.

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of "structure priming," the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in a previously untested language, Dutch. All experiments studied spoken sentence production. Importantly, pre-experimental baselines were measured for all target structures in order to assess possible effects of frequency on the magnitude of priming effect. We obtained priming with dative sentences, including datives with medially placed prepositional phrases, a sentence type not tested before. In one experiment we obtained priming effects with passives, including passives with sentence-final verbs, which also have never been tested before. However, we failed to obtain priming effects with active transitives. A comparison with the baseline data suggested that priming is not related to baseline frequency. Further, the results allowed us to draw an empirical generalization: Structure priming is a relatively long-term event, lasting at least several trials. The implications of these findings are discussed.