Subject Relative Clauses Research Articles

Eastern Yiddish Relative Clauses in an Areal Perspective: An Analysis Based on the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry

Despite a vast literature on Yiddish relative clauses, their linguistic and geographical aspects have often been neglected. Based on data from the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (JCAAJ), the areal distribution of subject and oblique relative clauses is analyzed for the first time. I show that vos ‘that; what’, which also introduces non-relative complement clauses, is the most common element to introduce subject relative clauses, whereas in oblique relative clauses, the pronoun velx- ‘which’ predominates. This contrast suggests a division of labor between nonpronominal and pronominal elements depending on the syntactic role of the relativized NP. As to the areal aspect, vos accompanied by a resumptive personal pronoun is primarily used in Central Eastern and Southeastern Yiddish, whereas nonrelative comple-mentizing vos is typical of Southeastern and central Northeastern Yiddish. These areal distributions mirror patterns of coterritorial Slavic languages: The more widespread use of nonrelative complementizing vos is reminiscent of the corresponding use of Ukrainian ščo and Belarusian što ‘what; that’, whereas the preference for resumptive personal pronouns is observed in Polish and Ukrainian. Comparatively recent convergence with Slavic seems to play a role in the emergence of resumptive pronouns and nonrelative complementizing vos in the varieties of Yiddish.*

Fast passives, slow relatives

ABSTRACT Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and three-clause structures in active and passive voice. The complex structures included complements and relative clauses. The experiment yielded 1,884 utterances that were coded for lexical, grammatical, and fluency factors. Articulation rate was calculated for the 790 fully fluent utterances. Age, utterance length, and structure affected rate. Increases in rate as speakers age are generally taken to reflect gains in proficiency as the complex skills of language production are practiced. The length effect is tentatively explained in terms of a strategy that adjusts the time to articulate different structures. Central analyses found passives articulated faster than actives, and subject (passive) relative clauses articulated faster than object (active) relative clauses. These structural effects—the rate increase in passives and rate decrease in object relatives—support a planning-based account that hinges on filler-gap dependencies.

A preliminary fMRI study of relative clause in comprehension among native and non-native Malay language speakers

This study investigates (a) whether there is a functional neural activation at the frontal and temporal brain regions during the comprehension of Malay relative clause (RC), and (b) the differences in the activated areas among native (L1) and non-native (L2) Malay language speakers. The subject relative clause (SRC), object relative clause (ORC), and subject-verb-object (SVO) were used as the study stimuli. Participants were asked to do a sentence-picture matching task during an fMRI measurement. The random-effect analysis (RFX) using two-way ANOVA was conducted for the fMRI data. The main effect of the group at the puncorrected < 0.001, cluster size > 20 voxels found that the comprehension of Malay relative clauses had activated frontal and temporal brain regions in L1 and L2. The multiple comparisons of L1>L2 showed a significant difference left-lateralised in the temporo-parietal region. While for L2>L1, the significant activations were indicated as distributed to the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions that lateralised to the right hemisphere. Conclusions: The findings suggested that the comprehension of Malay relative clauses had caused the activation at different brain regions amongst L1 and L2 groups. It was also found that both L1 and L2 groups showed their preference in SRC, the mean reaction time showed that they had a faster reaction time to comprehend SRC than ORC. The findings from this study can also be applied in clinical language intervention, and it is expected to benefit children and adults with speech and language disorders.

Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that saw the girl’). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies – an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task – investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.

Ambiguity Avoidance by Means of Function Words in English? Providing Additional Corpus-based Counterevidence

AbstractThe present paper considers three types of constructions where optional function words have been claimed to be used primarily for the purpose of avoiding a global or local attachment ambiguity. a) In the absence of the complementiser inthat-clauses, certain subject NPs might be (temporarily) misconstrued as direct objects of the superordinate verb. b) In the absence of the complementiserthat, certain adverbials might be (wrongly) assigned to the subordinate or the superordinate clause. c) In the absence of a relativiser, certain combinations of the antecedent NP and the relative clause subject might be (temporarily) misconstrued as forming a single NP. The paper uses two corpus-based testing procedures to refute these claims. (i) Analysing otherwise comparable ambiguity-free and ambiguity-prone structures in a)–c) we find that they involve similar rates of function word use. (ii) Moreover, it is shown that a variety of other ambiguity-free constructions, containing the same or other optional grammatical markers, display similar distributional profiles.

Comprehension and Eye Movements in the Processing of Subject- and Object-Relative Clauses: Evidence from Dyslexia and Individual Differences.

In this study, we examined eye movements and comprehension in sentences containing a relative clause. To date, few studies have focused on syntactic processing in dyslexia and so one goal of the study is to contribute to this gap in the experimental literature. A second goal is to contribute to theoretical psycholinguistic debate concerning the cause and the location of the processing difficulty associated with object-relative clauses. We compared dyslexic readers (n = 50) to a group of non-dyslexic controls (n = 50). We also assessed two key individual differences variables (working memory and verbal intelligence), which have been theorised to impact reading times and comprehension of subject- and object-relative clauses. The results showed that dyslexics and controls had similar comprehension accuracy. However, reading times showed participants with dyslexia spent significantly longer reading the sentences compared to controls (i.e., a main effect of dyslexia). In general, sentence type did not interact with dyslexia status. With respect to individual differences and the theoretical debate, we found that processing difficulty between the subject and object relatives was no longer significant when individual differences in working memory were controlled. Thus, our findings support theories, which assume that working memory demands are responsible for the processing difficulty incurred by (1) individuals with dyslexia and (2) object-relative clauses as compared to subject relative clauses.

Beyond input: Language learners produce novel relative clause types without exposure.

ABSTRACT Syntax famously consists of abstract hierarchical representations. Less famously, most theories of syntax also assume a higher level of abstract representation: one that abstracts over the hierarchical representations. The existence of such representations would imply that, under certain circumstances, speakers should be able to produce syntactic structures they have never been exposed to. We test this prediction directly. In particular, different types of relative clauses have different surface word orders. These may be represented in two ways: with many individual representations, or with one general representation. If the latter, then learning one type of relative clause amounts to learning them all. We teach participants a novel grammar for only some relative clause types (e.g. just subject relative clauses) and test their knowledge of other types (e.g. object relative clauses). Across experiments, participants consistently produced untrained types, providing the first experimental evidence for this higher level of abstract syntactic knowledge.

İKİNCİ DİLİ ÖĞRENEN YETİŞKİNLERİN ÖZNE-NESNE KONUMUNDAKİ SIFAT CÜMLECİKLERİNİ EDİNİMİ

Studies on the acquisition, production and comprehension of relative clauses have been increasing dramatically in recent decades. Various models have been proposed to explain the mechanism and dynamics of relative clauses. The relative complex nature of relative clauses has been challenging linguists and cognitive scientists. However, one of the commonalities in these models is that object relative clauses are harder to process, comprehend and produce than subject relative clauses. This study aimed to focus on the adult learners’ acquisition of relative clauses. Therefore, four tasks were developed to elicit the data regarding the production and comprehension of subject-object relative clauses. Hamilton’s subject-object hypothesis was tested. Five international participants learning Turkish and seven Turkish individuals learning English were involved in the study. The results show that all of the participants produced and comprehended subject relative clauses more easily than object relative clauses. The findings of the study support those of the related literature in that object relative clauses are harder to process, produce and comprehend.

Processing Chinese relative clauses in context by Italian L3 learners

The present study investigates third language (L3) learners’ processing of Chinese subject and object relative clauses in a supportive context. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested native Italian L3 learners of Mandarin Chinese and native Chinese speakers. The results showed that the L3 learners read significantly more slowly than the native speakers in all the target regions. Also, in the head noun region, they read object relative clauses significantly more slowly compared to subject relative clauses, indicating a preference for the latter. By contrast, for the native speakers, no significant differences were observed between subject and object relative clauses in any of the target regions. The L3 learners’ performance offers support for the Structural Distance Hypothesis over the Dependency Locality Theory, and the contrast between the two populations indicates that context is at play in the processing of relative clauses.

Introduction

Introduction

Resumptive pronouns facilitate processing of long-distance relative clause dependencies in second language English

This study provides evidence that resumptive pronouns (RPs) can facilitate the processing of long-distance subject relative clause (RC) dependencies during second language (L2) sentence comprehension, even where they are disallowed in both the first language (L1) and the target language. A test group of 29 L1-Korean L2 learners (L2ers) of English and a control group of 25 native English speakers completed an online self-paced reading task (SPRT) and an offline acceptability judgment task (AJT) designed to test whether RPs reflect Interlanguage grammar representations and/or a strategy to alleviate processing overload. Analysis of the SPRT data from both response times and comprehension question accuracy indicates that RPs assisted the L2ers, but not the native speakers, with dependency resolution in long-distance RCs. For the AJT data, a proficiency effect was observed whereby some lower-proficiency L2ers, but not the higher-proficiency ones or the native speakers, tended to prefer RPs over gaps in long-distance RCs. The implications of these findings and plans for future research are discussed.

Anaphor reconstruction in Japanese relative clauses

AbstractThis study conducted two experiments to examine the derivation of the head noun phrase in Japanese relative clauses, with a focus on whether the anaphorsjibun‘self’ andjibun-jishin‘self-self’ within the head noun phrase can be co-referential with the relative clause subject. It aims to settle a long-standing debate among the previous studies concerning the interpretation of the anaphors inside the head noun phrase: while several studies claimed that the co-reference between the anaphorjibun‘self’ and the relative clause subject is prohibited, many other studies argued that such co-reference is possible. In addition, it has been claimed that while co-indexing the anaphorjibunwith the relative clause subject might be marginally acceptable, it would become fully acceptable if we replacejibunwith the morphologically complex anaphorjibun-jishin‘self-self’, which implies that the morphological make-up of an anaphor may affect its ability to be co-indexed with the relative clause subject.The results of two carefully controlled truth value judgment experiments show that neither the simplex anaphorjibunnor the complex anaphorjibun-jishinwithin the head noun phrase of relative clauses can take the relative clause subject as its antecedent, which suggests that the head noun phrase does not reconstruct and therefore lends support to thepro-binding analysis of Japanese relative clauses. Moreover, the findings also suggest that the morphological make-up of an anaphor does not affect its ability to take the relative clause subject as its antecedent, despite the claim that it is more acceptable to co-index the complex anaphorjibun-jishinwith the relative clause subject than the simplex anaphorjibun.

The Production of Complex Syntax in Spontaneous Language by 4-Year-Old Children With Hearing Loss.

Purpose Proficiency with complex syntax is important for language and reading comprehension, and production of complex syntax begins to emerge shortly after a young child begins using two-word combinations. Complex syntax production in preschool children with hearing loss who use spoken language has been explored minimally. The purpose of this study was to compare complex syntax production of 4-year-old children with hearing loss to age-matched and language-matched peers with normal hearing. Method Seventy-two children completed a language assessment battery, including a structured language sample. Complex syntax density and number and accuracy of productions of particular types of complex syntax were compared across three groups: 4-year-old children with hearing loss, an age-matched group of children with normal hearing, and an mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched group of children with normal hearing. Results Children with hearing loss had lower complex syntax density and fewer correct productions of coordinated clauses, subordinate clauses, and simple infinitives than their age-matched, but not language-matched, peers. Furthermore, children with hearing loss had lower accuracy than the age-matched group on simple infinitives and lower accuracy than both the age- and MLU-matched groups on full propositional complements and subject relative clauses. Conclusion Children with hearing loss exhibit delays in complex syntax acquisition as compared to their same-age peers and disruptions in development on some complex structures as compared to MLU-matched, younger children. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14080193.

Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control.

Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed by Hornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions: Subject Relatives; Object Relatives; Subject Control; Object Control. Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999).

Toward a principled Bayesian workflow in cognitive science.

Experiments in research on memory, language, and in other areas of cognitive science are increasingly being analyzed using Bayesian methods. This has been facilitated by the development of probabilistic programming languages such as Stan, and easily accessible front-end packages such as brms. The utility of Bayesian methods, however, ultimately depends on the relevance of the Bayesian model, in particular whether or not it accurately captures the structure of the data and the data analyst's domain expertise. Even with powerful software, the analyst is responsible for verifying the utility of their model. To demonstrate this point, we introduce a principled Bayesian workflow (Betancourt, 2018) to cognitive science. Using a concrete working example, we describe basic questions one should ask about the model: prior predictive checks, computational faithfulness, model sensitivity, and posterior predictive checks. The running example for demonstrating the workflow is data on reading times with a linguistic manipulation of object versus subject relative clause sentences. This principled Bayesian workflow also demonstrates how to use domain knowledge to inform prior distributions. It provides guidelines and checks for valid data analysis, avoiding overfitting complex models to noise, and capturing relevant data structure in a probabilistic model. Given the increasing use of Bayesian methods, we aim to discuss how these methods can be properly employed to obtain robust answers to scientific questions. All data and code accompanying this article are available from https://osf.io/b2vx9/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Thematic Integration Impairments in Primary Progressive Aphasia: Evidence From Eye-Tracking.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative disease affecting language while leaving other cognitive facilities relatively unscathed. The agrammatic subtype of PPA (PPA-G) is characterized by agrammatic language production with impaired comprehension of noncanonical filler-gap syntactic structures, such as object-relatives [e.g., The sandwich that the girl ate (gap) was tasty], in which the filler (the sandwich) is displaced from the object position within the relative clause to a position preceding both the verb and the agent (the girl) and is replaced by a gap linked with the filler. One hypothesis suggests that the observed deficits of these structures reflect impaired thematic integration, including impaired prediction of the thematic role of the filler and impaired thematic integration at the gap, but spared structure building (i.e., creation of the gap). In the current study, we examined the on-line comprehension of object-relative and subject-relative clauses in healthy controls and individuals with agrammatic and logopenic PPA using eye-tracking. Eye-movement patterns in canonical subject-relative clause structures were essentially spared in both PPA groups. In contrast, eye-movement patterns in noncanonical object-relative clauses revealed delayed thematic prediction in both agrammatic and logopenic PPA, on-time structure building (i.e., gap-filling) in both groups, and abnormal thematic integration in agrammatic, but not logopenic, PPA. We argue that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that agrammatic comprehension deficits reflect impaired thematic integration.

Acquisition of Japanese relative clauses by L1 Chinese learners: Evidence from reflexive pronoun resolution

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun ‘self’ within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to acquire the underlying syntactic knowledge that the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses is base-generated external to the relative clause. A truth value judgment experiment was conducted and the findings suggest that L1 Chinese learners can indeed acquire the target syntactic knowledge in Japanese relative clauses, which argues against the Representational Deficit hypotheses and supports the Full Functional Representation hypotheses of L2 acquisition.

Both activation and deactivation of functional networks support increased sentence processing costs

The research on the neural correlates underlying the language system has gradually moved away from the traditional Broca-Wernicke framework to a network perspective in the past 15 years. Language processing is found to be supported by the co-activation of both core and peripheral brain regions. However, the dynamic co-activation patterns of these brain regions serving different language functions remain to be fully revealed. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study focused on sentence processing at different syntactic complexity levels to examine how the co-activation of different brain networks will be modulated by increased processing costs. Chinese relative clauses were used to probe the two dimensions of syntactic complexity: embeddedness (left-branching vs. center-embedded) and gap-filler dependency (subject-gap vs. object-gap) using the general linear model (GLM) approach, independent component analysis (ICA) and graph theoretical analysis. In contrast to localized activation revealed by the GLM approach, ICA identified more extensive networks both positively and negatively correlated with the task. We found that the posterior default mode network was anti-correlated to the gap-filler integration costs with increased deactivation for the left-branching object relative clauses compared to subject relative clauses, suggesting the involvement of this network in leveraging the cognitive resources based on the complexity level of the language task. Concurrent activation and deactivation of networks were found to be associated with the higher costs induced by center-embedding and its interaction with gap-filler integration. The graph theoretical analysis further unveiled that center-embeddedness imposed more attentional demand on the subject relative clause, as characterized by its higher degree and strength in the ventral attention network, and higher processing costs of syntactic reanalysis on the object relative clause, as characterized by increased intermodular connections of the language network with other networks. The results suggest that network activation and deactivation profiles are modulated by different dimensions of syntactic complexity to serve the higher demand of creating a coherent semantic representation.

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence-Picture Matching and Eye Movements.

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., "Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing"). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5-6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., "where is the tractor that the car is following") to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.

Son Edinilen İlk Unutulur Prensibi: Tipik Gelişim Gösteren Çocuklar ve Broka Afazili Bireylerin Türkçe İlgi Tümcelerini Anlamlandırma Süreçleri

The present study addresses whether adults with Broca’s aphasia who have damage in their Posterior Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (PLIFG) show similar performance to typically developing children in their processing of complex syntax. We tested comprehension of Turkish relative clauses using a sentence-picture matching task in Broca’s patients and children with typical development (aged: 3;04-4;03). Both groups showed better performance in subject relative clauses compared to object relative clauses. Children's similar performance to Broca's patients might be due to the fact that PLIFG is a late-maturing neural region. Our participants had more errors in object relative clauses despite the first referent was the agent so there was no evidence for the agent-first strategy. Poor performance in object relative clauses was linked to the morphosyntactic complexity in these structures.