Sentence Perception Research Articles

Predictive analysis vs. segmentational analysis in sentence perception.

Three experiments involving ongoing sentence perception are described. A nonword detection (NWD) latency procedure was employed without a concurrent task (Experiment I), with a concurrent comprehension task (Experiment II), and with a concurrent recall task (Experiment III). Predictions were made based on two plausible models of sentence perception--predictive analysis (PA) and segmentational analysis (SA). Both characterize the hearer as actively imposing a grammatical structure on the input. PA constructs a surface structure representation sequentially (i.e., on a word-by-word basis). SA partitions off clauselike units before establishing the structure of smaller within-clause constitutents. The NWD latency data generally support a PA system (particularly when a concurrent task is used). The results of a nongrammatical condition in Experiment III confirmed that the general findings were not artifactual.

Some temporal aspects of spoken discourse

A sixteen‐minute “prompted monologue” was produced spontaneously by a male native speaker of English. The last five minutes, during which the speaker spoke without interruption by the prompter, were used for a listening test. Twenty‐five subjects heard a filtered version and an undistorted version of the material, and indicated their perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries by pressing a telegraph key. The percent pre‐boundary lengthening was calculated for perceived sentence and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted “turn” as well as for the boundaries of “turns”. The average pre‐boundary lengthening for sentence boundaries and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted five‐minute “turn” was 34.0% and 34.4% respectively, while the pre‐boundary lengthening before the end of a “turn” averaged 42.9%. Pauses between sentences averaged 737 ms, those between paragraphs, 1659 ms, and those between “turns”, 5045 ms. While the difference between paragraph terminations and “turn” terminations could be explained on the basis of pause duration as well as difference in degree of lengthening, other factors enter the picture as far as the distinction between sentence and paragraph boundaries within a “turn” is concerned.

Functional clauses and sentence segmentation.

In two experiments subjects listened to a sentence containing a brief tone, then wrote out the sentence and marked the location of the tone. The experimental sentences were biclausal with the tone placed before or after the clause break. The initial clause was either functionally complete or functionally incomplete. Functionally complete clauses contain a complete set of fully specified grammatical relations, while functionally incomplete clauses do not. In Experiment 1 tones were mislocated toward the clause break and the final word of the first clause significantly more often for functionally complete clauses. Experiment 2 replicated this finding holding deep- and surface-structure variables constant. The results indicate that functionally complete clauses are better segmentation units during sentence perception than functionally incomplete clauses. Purely structural theories of the units of sentence perception cannot account for this finding.

Sentence perception units and levels of syntactic structure.

Subjects listened to recorded sentences which were followed by probe words. They performed a next-word naming task—uttering the word that followed the probe word in the original sentence as quickly as possible. Other things being equal, naming latencies are longer when the juncture between the probe word and the response word in the original sentence sequence terminates a “functionally complete” unit than when this position corresponds to the boundary of a “functionally incomplete” unit. These results are not predicted by existent “syntactic” theories of sentence perception units, and these theories are to that extent shown to be inadequate. A “functional” program for the study of sentence perception is suggested.

Developmental Sequences in Perception and Interpretation of Ambiguous Sentences

The present research assessed the normal development of ability to perceive and interpret lexical and syntactic ambiguities in 40 grade school children, 10 kindergarteners, 10 second-graders, 10 fourth-graders, 10 sixth-graders, and 10 college students. Eight lexically ambiguous, eight syntactically ambiguous, and four unambiguous control sentences were presented for interpretation of their alternatives in meaning. Each experimental sentence was associated with four pictorial choices. Significant increases in the ability to perceive and interpret the alternative meanings of the lexical ambiguities occurred at or before the fourth grade (mean age 10 yr., 0 mo.) while significant changes for the syntactic and deep-structure ambiguities occurred at or before the sixth grade (mean age 12 yr., 0 mo.). Reaction times proved significantly shorter for the unambiguous than for the ambiguous sentences but remained stable over the present age range with the exception that the median reaction times between first and second responses decreased significantly between second grade and college level. The findings suggest that the ability to process lexical ambiguities increases and stabilizes during the concrete operational stage while the ability to process syntactic ambiguities stabilizes during the formal operational stage (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).

Strategies for sentence perception.

Three experiments are reported in which rapid sequential visual presentation of sentences--RSVP--was used to determine some perceptual processes in sentence perception. It was found that adjectives, when they are actually or potentially modifiers of a noun, are far less likely to be reported than any other part of the sentence. On the other hand, adjectives which are attribute adjectives are as likely to be reported as any other part of the sentence. Conclusions are drawn concerning sentence perception in general.

READING, PERCEPTUAL STRATEGIES AND CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS1

Psycholinguistic research in sentence perception supports a model of the reading process in which the reader matches expectancies set up by sampling previous syntactic clues in a text with the structural signals which follow. Such expectancies are language specific, and when they are applied to reading a second language various confusions and comprehension breakdowns result. Examples from three learning situations, Japanese reading English, Persians reading English, and English speakers reading Hindi, are presented and an analysis is made of the competing syntactic processes which account for the confusions arising in each case–negation, relativization and co–reference. The evidence lends some support for a model of second language acquisition like that proposed by Numser (1971) as well as a general apriori“predictive” version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis.

The Role of Surface Order and Surface Deletion in Sentence Perception

The perceptual complexity of intransitive adverbials, truncated passives and full passives was investigated in two experiments using rapid visual processing tasks. Both forms of passive were found to be more complex than the intransitive adverbials, presumably because of the lack of correspondence of surface and base orders. However, deletion of the logical subject in truncated passives did not increase their complexity relative to full passives.

SEMANTIC CONSTRAINTS AND SENTENCE PERCEPTION

This study investigates semantic constraints in reversible sentences and their relationship to sentence perception. In Expt. I, subjects were given anagrams of reversible sentences to solve, and any preferences for one version of the sentence over the other were taken to indicate the presence of semantic constraints in that sentence. In the second part of the experiment, subjects were presented with these sentences masked with white noise, and there was found to be a relationship between the semantic constraints and the ease of perceiving the sentences. Expts. II and III provide evidence that these constraints derive from a knowledge of the overall relationship expressed in the sentence rather than from the meanings of individual words. Previous experiments have failed to find any effect of semantic constraints in sentence perception; this discrepancy is explained in terms of the strategies subjects might have adopted in the various tasks.

Some remarks on “ambiguity” and “perceptual processes”

A paper by Bever, Garrett, and Hurtig on the perception of ambiguous sentences is analyzed in terms of (1) the explanation offered for the experimental findings, (2) the linguistic theory underlying the experiment, and (3) the characteristics of the stimuli utilized. It is concluded that Bever, Garrett, and Hurtig's findings are open to serious question, particularly because of multiple deficiencies in the design of the experiment.

Processing structure of sentence perception.

To extract meaning from a sentence, the listener must combine information from several levels of linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic research1 has documented a range of processing levels from the phonetic to the semantic, but has not explored the central problem of specifying the interactions between these levels. We have examined three fundamental questions about the processing structure of sentence perception. When, during sentence processing, does information at different levels become available to the listener; what is the time-course of the interactions between these levels; and what is the direction of information flow between them?

Sentence Perception as an Interactive Parallel Process

The restoration of disrupted words to their original form in a sentence shadowing task is dependent upon semantic and syntactic context variables, thus demonstrating an on-line interaction between the structural and the lexical and phonetic levels of sentence processing.

Speech perception in schizophrenia.

Although there have been several reports of investigations of speech perception in schizophrenia (Laffal, 1961; Lawson, McGhie and Chapman, 1964) in all cases the assumption was made that the patients’ difficulties arose, not from an inability to perceive the individual words, but from a deficiency in perceiving the words in a meaningful relationship to each other, as part of an organized pattern. In this study, however, instead of examining the performance of schizophrenic patients on a task involving the perception of sentences, as these earlier workers had done, we have used individual words as stimuli in a series of tests of speech perception.

Some Semantic Properties in Sentence Perception

Recent developmental and experimental evidence indicates that a semantic strategy probably has priority over a linguistic strategy in sentence perception and comprehension by adults. This investigation was carried out under the assumption that differential effects would obtain in semantic strategy when a task is contrived with major constraints on semantic strategy in the context of a constant operation in syntactic processing. In two studies systematic semantic manipulations were made on the noun in NP2 for unmodified transitive sentences which underwent active to passive transformations in a communicatively sterile context. Plurality, single or double syllables, and derivation type (topical) were not significant morphemic variations on the noun in NP2. However, variations of animateness on the noun in NP3 constituted significant semantic properties in perceiving sentences that underwent active to passive transformations.

Rhythm and syntax in sentence perception

Subjects were required to perceive sentences in noise. A set was induced by presenting a series of sentences that had the same syntax and rhythm. On a final test sentence either the rhythm alone or rhythm plus surface structure was changed. Changes in rhythm led to major disruptions in performance, while the effect of syntax alone was not significant. The results point out the fundamental importance of rhythm in speech perception and suggest caution in attributing speech perception effects to syntax without controlling for rhythm.

Perception of word boundaries under conditions of lexical bias.

Abstract The unitary hypothesis of sentence perception implies a decoding process wherein listeners anticipate or confirm lexical units according to received syntactic information. A test of this hypothesis was made by constructing sentences which biased subjects to misinterpret the word boundaries of certain words making items subsequent and prior to this word meaningless. All material was presented by audio tape and read without phonetic bias (experiment 1) and with phonetic bias uncontrolled (experiment 2). Immediate recall scores were depressed relative to an appropriate control group (more so for experiment 1 than experiment 2) offering support for the unitary perception hypothesis.

Order of main and subordinate clauses in sentence perception

An experiment was conducted to determine whether two-clause sentences are easier to perceive when the main clause occurs first than when the subordinate clause occurs first. Using a rapid visual processing task, this effect was obtained for adverbials and noun-phrase complements; but the reverse was found for relatives, that is, right-branching relatives were more difficult than center-embedded relatives. These results cannot be explained by a general principle postulating the primary role of the main clause in the perceptual organization of sentences. The results also indicate that singly center-embedded sentences are processed in a very different manner from multiply center-embedded sentences.

Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language

In generative grammar there is a traditional distinction between sentence acceptability, having to do with performance, and sentence grammaticality, having to do with competence. The attempt of this paper is to provide a characterization of the notion ‘acceptable sentence’ in English, with some suggestions as to how this characterization might be made universal. The procedure is to outline a set of procedures which are conjectured to be operative in the assignment of a surface structure tree to an input sentence. To some extent, these principles of parsing are modeled on certain parsing techniques formulated by computer scientists for computer languages. These principles account for the high acceptability of right branching structures, outline the role of grammatical function words in sentence perception, describe what seems to be a fixed limit on short-term memory in linguistic processing, and hypothesize the structure of the internal syntactic processing devices. The operation of various classes of transformations with regard to preparing deep structures for input to parsing procedures such as those outlined in the paper is discussed.

Phonological Units in Sentence Perception

Abstract Several studies employing the experimental task of click localization have lead to the hypothesis that syntactic structure units are the primary units in sentence perception. Studies involving reaction time to clicks in speech imply a modification of this hypothesis: That the initial perceptual unit is a phonologically defined phrase.

Semantic integration and sentence perception

A mixed list of semantically well-integrated (SWI) and semantically poorly integrated (SPI) sentences (constructed from associative sentence norms) was presented for shadowing to one group of Ss under quiet and to another group under noise (-5 db signal-to-noise ratio). The SWI and SPI sentences were balanced for length, number, and stress of syllables, number and type of phones, noun animateness, and word frequency. An incidental-recall task followed one trial of shadowing. As anticipated, shadowing under quiet was virtually perfect for both SWI and SPI sentences, noise reduced shadowing overall and SWI sentences were shadowed better than SPI sentences under noise. Incidental learning of SWl material was enhanced by noise, and noise produced a difference in incidental learning in favor of SWI material. An assumption underlying the present research is that the meaning of a word is represented by (among other things) the linguistic contexts that are part of its dictionary definition and the linguistic contexts that are correlates of the experiences (linguistic and nonlinguistic) commonly associated with the word. Such contexts are referred to here as a word's contextual features. Thus, on this view the predicates in the sentences, The doctor