Syntactic Assignment Research Articles

Syntactic comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment, autism or Down syndrome

This study examined syntactic assignment for predicates and reflexives as well as working memory effects in the sentence comprehension of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), Down syndrome (DS), high functioning Autism (HFA) and Typical Language Development (TLD). Fifty-seven children (35 boys and 22 girls) performed a computerised picture-selection sentence comprehension task. Predicate attachment and reflexive antecedent assignment (with working memory manipulations) were investigated. The results showed that SLI, HFA and DS children exhibited poorer overall performance than TLD children. Children with SLI exhibited similar performance to the DS and HFA children only when working memory demands were higher. We conclude that children with SLI, HFA and DS differ from children with TLD in their comprehension of predicate and reflexive structures where the knowledge of syntactic assignment is required. Working memory manipulation had different effects on syntactic comprehension depending on language disorder. Intelligence was not an explanatory factor for the differences observed in performance.

Argument-function mismatches in Mandarin resultatives: A lexical mapping account

This paper seeks to account for the argument-function mismatches observed in Mandarin resultative compound verbs. The account is formulated within a revised Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT) which incorporates a unified mapping principle. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of this mapping principle (or the θ-Criterion), a composite role, formed by two composing roles, receives syntactic assignment via one composing role only; the second composing role is thus suppressed. Argument-function mismatches are due to the competition between composing roles for syntactic assignment. This LMT account also facilitates a natural explanation of markedness among the competing syntactic structures.

Conjoint and dissociable effects of syntactic and semantic context.

Manipulating the semantic relatedness of noun and verb targets in contexts where they are grammatically appropriate or inappropriate allows for simultaneous examination of syntactic and semantic context effects. A lexical-decision experiment showed both a syntactic context effect and a semantic relatedness effect that was stronger in syntactically appropriate conditions. Thus, latencies appeared to be conjointly determined by syntactic and semantic context. In contrast, naming experiments also showed both semantic and syntactic effects, but the syntactic context effect was independent of semantic relatedness and was observed in the virtual absence of sensitivity to semantic anomaly. Thus, syntactic and semantic processing are largely dissociable in the naming task. In conjunction with other findings in the literature, this suggests the existence of an isolable level of syntactic assignment that precedes semantic integration of content words in sentence comprehension.

The Interaction of Referential Ambiguity and Argument Structure in the Parsing of Prepositional Phrases

This research addresses the question of whether the initial interpretation of structurally ambiguous sentences (such as He dropped the book on the chair) is made purely on the basis of syntactic principles or whether semantic processes also exert an influence. Two factors, referential ambiguity (e.g., whether there is more than one referent for the book), and verb argument structure (e.g., whether the verb takes on the chair as an optional or obligatory argument) were manipulated in two experiments using a subject-paced moving-window technique. These experiments found that the need to resolve an ambiguous noun phrase referent interacted with the obligatory/optional nature of verb arguments. Discourse information affected initial syntactic assignment of the prepositional phrase, but only for verbs taking optional goal arguments. For verbs taking obligatory goal arguments, the attachment decision was independent of whether the noun phrase was referentially ambiguous. A third experiment found that prepositional phrases are not initially interpreted as modifiers if a disambiguating adjective immediately precedes the noun, clearly implicating referential ambiguity as the mechanism affecting the interpretation of the prepositional phrase. These results support a limited influence of discourse semantics on the parsing of prepositional phrases and are inconsistent with models that propose no influence of semantics on syntax and models that propose complete interaction.