Temporary Syntactic Ambiguities Research Articles

Sentence processing in bilingual children

Abstract Research in sentence processing in bilingual children is emergent but incomplete as very few studies examine the processing of structurally complex sentences or bilingual children’s real-time interpretation of sentences. One underexplored linguistic feature which can offer insights in this direction are garden-path sentences, i.e., sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguity. These are difficult to process for monolingual children as incremental processing results in an initial misinterpretation and the need for reanalysis. Studies on bilingual children’s processing of garden-path sentences have used paradigms with limited ecological validity and which are not informative about one’s interpretation while listening. This study bridges this gap by investigating the processing of garden-path sentences in bilingual children with the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. It further explores the role of referential context in the visual stimuli to aid disambiguation. Monolingual and bilingual children aged 8–11 years completed a task similar to Trueswell et al. (1999). The results showed similar difficulty with revising garden-path sentences as evidenced by comprehension accuracy for both groups but only the monolinguals showed real-time garden-path effects in the gaze data. We interpret these findings as a manifestation of slower sentence processing in bilingual children. Both groups made limited use of the referential context to facilitate processing.

Estimating the True Cost of Garden Pathing: A Computational Model of Latent Cognitive Processes.

What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach captures differences between noun phrase/zero complement (NP/Z) garden-path sentences and semantically biased reduced relative clause (RRC) garden-path sentences: The NP/Z garden path occurs nearly deterministically but can be mostly eliminated by adding a comma. By contrast, the RRC garden path occurs with a lower probability, but disambiguation via semantic plausibility is not alwayseffective.

Processing Garden-Path Sentences in Sight Translation: An Experimental Study

Garden-path refers to a type of temporary syntactic ambiguity in which the phrase structure rules allow two possible attachments of a constituent (Fromkin, Rodman & Hymas, 2011, p. 385). This study aims to investigate whether sight translators who are trained on this type of translation perform better in overcoming garden-path effect than other translators who are not trained on sight translation. During the translation process of such sentences, the sight transla-tor is expected to parse the syntactic order of the source text correctly to grasp the meaning, and reformulate the message in the target language applying the necessary transpositions in the word order. An experiment was designed to test the performance differences in sight trans-lation of garden-path sentences. Experimental and control groups were given five garden-path sentences within various contexts and were asked to record their voices. The results showed that trained sight translators tend to receive garden-path sentences as a whole and concentrate on the message of the sentence, making use of certain skills and techniques in reading. In this sense, trained sight translators are more successful in parsing complex sentences with garden-path effect than ordinary readers.

Syntactic ambiguity resolution in dyslexia: An examination of cognitive factors underlying eye movement differences and comprehension failures.

This study examined eye movements and comprehension of temporary syntactic ambiguities in individuals with dyslexia, as few studies have focused on sentence-level comprehension in dyslexia. We tested 50 participants with dyslexia and 50 typically developing controls, in order to investigate (a) whether dyslexics have difficulty revising temporary syntactic misinterpretations and (b) underlying cognitive factors (i.e., working memory and processing speed) associated with eye movement differences and comprehension failures. In the sentence comprehension task, participants read subordinate-main structures that were either ambiguous or unambiguous, and we also manipulated the type of verb contained in the subordinate clause (i.e., reflexive or optionally transitive). Results showed a main effect of group on comprehension, in which individuals with dyslexia showed poorer comprehension than typically developing readers. In addition, participants with dyslexia showed longer total reading times on the disambiguating region of syntactically ambiguous sentences. With respect to cognitive factors, working memory was more associated with group differences than was processing speed. Conclusions focus on sentence-level syntactic processing issues in dyslexia (a previously under-researched area) and the relationship between online and offline measures of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

When is a wh-in-situ question identified in standard Persian?

ABSTRACTPrevious literature demonstrated the influential role of prediction in processing speech [Brazil, 1981. The place of intonation in a discourse model. In C. Malcolm & M. Montgomery (Eds.), Studies in discourse analysis (pp. 146–157). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Grosjean, 1983. How long is the sentence? Prediction and prosody in the on-line processing of language. Linguistics, 21, 501–529, 1996a. Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in English and French: Normal and brain damaged subjects. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 107–134; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003. Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 103–130], and of prosody in predicting the eventual syntactic structure of ambiguous sentences [e.g. Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003. Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 103–130]. Wh-in-situ questions contain temporary syntactic ambiguity. One of the languages characterised by wh-in-situ questions is Persian. The current research adopted the gating paradigm [Grosjean, 1980. Spoken word recognition processes and the gating paradigm. Perception and Psychophysics, 28, 267–283] to investigate when distinctive prosodic cues of the pre-wh part enable correct identification of wh-in-situ questions in Persian. A perception experiment was designed in which gated stimuli were played to Persian native speakers in a forced-choice sentence identification task. In line with our expectation, correct identification responses were given from the beginning of the sentence. The result is discussed in the context of proposals regarding the need to integrate prosody and prediction into models of language and speech processing [Beach, 1991. The interpretation of prosodic patterns at points of syntactic structure ambiguity: Evidence for cue trading relations. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 644–663; Grosjean, 1983. How long is the sentence? Prediction and prosody in the on-line processing of language. Linguistics, 21, 501–529, 1996a. Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in English and French: Normal and brain damaged subjects. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 107–134].

Electrophysiology of prosodic and lexical-semantic processing during sentence comprehension in aphasia

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine how individuals with aphasia and a group of age-matched controls use prosody and themattic fit information in sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Two groups of individuals with aphasia were investigated; those demonstrating relatively good sentence comprehension whose primary language difficulty is anomia (Individuals with Anomic Aphasia (IWAA)), and those who demonstrate impaired sentence comprehension whose primary diagnosis is Broca's aphasia (Individuals with Broca's Aphasia (IWBA)). The stimuli had early closure syntactic structure and contained a temporary early closure (correct)/late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguity. The prosody was manipulated to either be congruent or incongruent, and the temporarily ambiguous NP was also manipulated to either be a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g., "While the band played the song/the beer pleased all the customers."). It was hypothesized that an implausible NP in sentences with incongruent prosody may provide the parser with a plausibility cue that could be used to predict syntactic structure. The results revealed that incongruent prosody paired with a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 complex at the implausible NP (the beer) in both the controls and the IWAAs, yet incongruent prosody without a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 at the critical verb (pleased) only in healthy controls. IWBAs did not show evidence of N400 or P600 effects at the ambiguous NP or critical verb, although they did show evidence of a delayed N400 effect at the sentence-final word in sentences with incongruent prosody. These results suggest that IWAAs have difficulty integrating prosodic cues with underlying syntactic structure when lexical-semantic information is not available to aid their parse. IWBAs have difficulty integrating both prosodic and lexical-semantic cues with syntactic structure, likely due to a processing delay.

Executive Function and Intelligence in the Resolution of Temporary Syntactic Ambiguity: An Individual Differences Investigation

In the current study, we examined the role of intelligence and executive functions in the resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity using an individual differences approach. Data were collected from 174 adolescents and adults who completed a battery of cognitive tests as well as a sentence comprehension task. The critical items for the comprehension task consisted of object/subject garden paths (e.g., While Anna dressed the baby that was small and cute played in the crib), and participants answered a comprehension question (e.g., Did Anna dress the baby?) following each one. Previous studies have shown that garden-path misinterpretations tend to persist into final interpretations. Results showed that both intelligence and processing speed interacted with ambiguity. Individuals with higher intelligence and faster processing were more likely to answer the comprehension questions correctly and, specifically, following ambiguous as opposed to unambiguous sentences. Inhibition produced a marginal effect, but the variance in inhibition was largely shared with intelligence. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their impact on syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Neural Measures Reveal Implicit Learning during Language Processing.

Language input is highly variable; phonological, lexical, and syntactic features vary systematically across different speakers, geographic regions, and social contexts. Previous evidence shows that language users are sensitive to these contextual changes and that they can rapidly adapt to local regularities. For example, listeners quickly adjust to accented speech, facilitating comprehension. It has been proposed that this type of adaptation is a form of implicit learning. This study examined a similar type of adaptation, syntactic adaptation, to address two issues: (1) whether language comprehenders are sensitive to a subtle probabilistic contingency between an extraneous feature (font color) and syntactic structure and (2) whether this sensitivity should be attributed to implicit learning. Participants read a large set of sentences, 40% of which were garden-path sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Critically, but unbeknownst to participants, font color probabilistically predicted the presence of a garden-path structure, with 75% of garden-path sentences (and 25% of normative sentences) appearing in a given font color. ERPs were recorded during sentence processing. Almost all participants indicated no conscious awareness of the relationship between font color and sentence structure. Nonetheless, after sufficient time to learn this relationship, ERPs time-locked to the point of syntactic ambiguity resolution in garden-path sentences differed significantly as a function of font color. End-of-sentence grammaticality judgments were also influenced by font color, suggesting that a match between font color and sentence structure increased processing fluency. Overall, these findings indicate that participants can implicitly detect subtle co-occurrences between physical features of sentences and abstract, syntactic properties, supporting the notion that implicit learning mechanisms are generally operative during online language processing.

The Role of Fundamental Frequency and Temporal Envelope in Processing Sentences with Temporary Syntactic Ambiguities.

Previous experiments have demonstrated the impact of speech prosody on syntactic processing. The present study was designed to examine how listeners use specific acoustic properties of prosody for grammatical interpretation. We investigated the independent contributions of two acoustic properties associated with the pitch and rhythmic properties of speech; the fundamental frequency and temporal envelope, respectively. The effect of degrading these prosodic components was examined by testing listeners' ability to parse early-closure garden-path sentences. A second aim was to investigate how effects of prosody interact with semantic effects of sentence plausibility. Using a task that required both a comprehension and a production response, we were able to determine that degradation of the speech envelope more consistently affects syntactic processing than degradation of the fundamental frequency. These effects are exacerbated in sentences with plausible misinterpretations, showing that prosodic degradation interacts with contextual cues to sentence interpretation.

Neural correlates of early-closure garden-path processing: Effects of prosody and plausibility.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate neural correlates of early-closure garden-path sentence processing and use of extrasyntactic information to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities. Sixteen participants performed an auditory picture verification task on sentences presented with natural versus flat intonation. Stimuli included sentences in which the garden-path interpretation was plausible, implausible because of a late pragmatic cue, or implausible because of a semantic mismatch between an optionally transitive verb and the following noun. Natural sentence intonation was correlated with left-hemisphere temporal activation, but also with activation that suggests the allocation of more resources to interpretation when natural prosody is provided. Garden-path processing was associated with upregulation in bilateral inferior parietal and right-hemisphere dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior frontal cortex, while differences between the strength and type of plausibility cues were also reflected in activation patterns. Region of interest (ROI) analyses in regions associated with complex syntactic processing are consistent with a role for posterior temporal cortex supporting access to verb argument structure. Furthermore, ROI analyses within left-hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus suggest a division of labour, with the anterior-ventral part primarily involved in syntactic-semantic mismatch detection, the central part supporting structural reanalysis, and the posterior-dorsal part showing a general structural complexity effect.

Is children's reading "good enough"? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences.

We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers. We also asked children questions to probe their comprehension of the syntactic ambiguity offline. They made more errors following ambiguous sentences than following control sentences, demonstrating that the initial incorrect parse of the garden-path sentence influenced offline comprehension. These findings are consistent with "good enough" processing effects seen in adults. While faster reading times and more regressions were generally associated with better comprehension, spending longer reading the question predicted comprehension success specifically in the ambiguous condition. This suggests that reading the question prompted children to reconstruct the sentence and engage in some form of processing, which in turn increased the likelihood of comprehension success. Older children were more sensitive to the syntactic function of commas, and, overall, they were faster and more accurate than younger children.

The role of LIFG-based executive control in sentence comprehension

Prior research has shown that patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) can have difficulties in executive control as well as understanding syntactic garden-paths, that is, sentences with a temporary syntactic ambiguity that resolve towards a less preferred interpretation. The present study tested two LIFG patients on object/subject garden path and matched syntactically unambiguous sentences. Besides syntactic ambiguity, support for the preferred but ultimately inappropriate interpretation was manipulated via verb bias, using verbs that were neutral between alternative analyses and verbs that were biased towards the context-inappropriate option. The LIFG patients, a non-LIFG patient, and healthy controls were tested on a sentence interpretation task (Experiment 1) and grammaticality judgement (Experiment 2). In contrast to the non-LIFG patient and controls, the LIFG patients showed impaired thematic role assignment across garden-path as well as unambiguous sentences, which tended to be worse with biased verbs. The results argue for a role of executive control in overcoming verb bias across diverse sentence processing situations, including, but not limited to, garden-path revision.

Electrophysiology of Sentence Processing in Aphasia: Prosodic Cues and Thematic Fit

Electrophysiology of Sentence Processing in Aphasia: Prosodic Cues and Thematic Fit

Children’s and Adolescents’ Processing of Temporary Syntactic Ambiguity: An Eye Movement Study

This study examined the eye movements of 24 children and adolescents as they read sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Prior research suggested that children primarily use grammatical information when making initial parsing decisions, and they tend to disregard semantic and contextual information. On each trial, participants read a garden path sentence (e.g., While the storm blew the boat sat in the shed), and, afterwards, they answered a comprehension question (e.g., Did the storm blow the boat?). The design was 2 × 2 (verb type × ambiguity) repeated measures. Verb type was optionally transitive or reflexive, and sentences were ambiguous or unambiguous. Results showed no differences in first pass reading times at the disambiguating verb (e.g., sat). However, regressions did show a significant interaction. The unambiguous-reflexive condition had approximately half the number of regressions, suggesting less processing difficulty in this condition. Developmentally, we found that adolescents had significantly better comprehension, which seemed to be linked to the increased tendency to regress from the disambiguating word. Findings are consistent with the assumption that the processing architecture is more restricted in children compared to adolescents. In addition, results indicated that variance in ambiguity resolution was associated with interference control but not working memory.

Priming prepositional phrase attachment: evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials.

Three syntactic-priming experiments investigated the effect of structurally similar or dissimilar prime sentences on the processing of target sentences, using eye tracking (Experiment 1) and event-related potentials (ERPs) (Experiments 2 and 3) All three experiments tested readers' response to sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. The ambiguity occurred because a prepositional phrase modifier (PP-modifier) could attach either to a preceding verb or to a preceding noun. Previous experiments have established that (a) noun-modifying expressions are harder to process than verb-modifying expressions (when test sentences are presented in isolation); and (b) for other kinds of sentences, processing a structurally similar prime sentence can facilitate processing a target sentence. The experiments reported here were designed to determine whether a structurally similar prime could facilitate processing of noun-attached modifiers and whether such facilitation reflected syntactic-structure-building or semantic processes. These findings have implications for accounts of structural priming during online comprehension and for accounts of syntactic representation and processing in comprehension.

Auditory temporal structure processing in dyslexia: processing of prosodic phrase boundaries is not impaired in children with dyslexia

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--temporal grouping--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase boundaries are characterized by temporal grouping of functionally related speech elements and can facilitate syntactic processing of speech. For example, temporary syntactic ambiguities, such as early-closure structures, are processed faster when prosodic phrase boundaries are present. We examined children's prosodic facilitation by measuring their efficiency of sentence processing for temporary syntactic ambiguities spoken with (facilitating) versus without (neutral) prosodic phrase boundaries. Both groups of children benefited similarly from prosodic facilitation, displaying faster reaction times in facilitating compared to neutral prosody. These findings indicate that the use of prosodic phrase boundaries for speech processing is not impaired in children with dyslexia.

No Fear of Commitment: Children’s Incremental Interpretation in English and Japanese Wh-Questions

Much work on child sentence processing has demonstrated that children are able to use various linguistic cues to incrementally resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities, but they fail to use syntactic or interpretability cues that arrive later in the sentence. The present study explores whether children incrementally resolve filler-gap dependencies, using Japanese and English ambiguous wh-questions of the form Where did Lizzie tell someone that she was gonna catch butterflies?, in which one could answer either the telling location (main clause interpretation) or the butterfly-catching location (embedded clause interpretation). Three story-based experiments demonstrate two novel findings on children’s incremental interpretation of filler-gap dependencies. First, we observe that English-speaking adults and children generally prefer the main clause interpretation, whereas Japanese adults and children both prefer the embedded clause interpretation. As the linear order of main clause and embedded clause predicates differs between English (main first, embedded second) and Japanese (embedded first, main second), the results indicate that adults and children actively associate the wh-phrase with the first predicate in the sentence. Second, Japanese children were unable to inhibit their embedded clause interpretation bias when the sentence was manipulated to syntactically block such analyses. The failure to inhibit the preferred interpretation suggests that the wh-phrase was incrementally associated with the embedded clause. On the other hand, when the sentence was manipulated to semantically block a plausible interpretation for the embedded clause wh-association, children were able to overcome their strong embedded clause interpretation bias and favored the main clause interpretation. These findings suggest that syntactic and interpretability cues may have distinct impacts on children’s sentence comprehension processes.

Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension.

When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers’ syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called “garden path sentences”). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: a priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.

Children’s and Adults’ On-Line Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences during Reading

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.

Difficulty processing temporary syntactic ambiguities in Lewy body spectrum disorder

While grammatical aspects of language are preserved, executive deficits are prominent in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Parkinson’s dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We examined executive control during sentence processing in LBSD by assessing temporary structural ambiguities. Using an on-line word detection procedure, patients heard sentences with a syntactic structure that has high-compatibility or low-compatibility with the main verb’s statistically preferred syntactic structure, and half of the sentences were lengthened strategically between the onset of the ambiguity and its resolution. We found selectively slowed processing of lengthened ambiguous sentences in the PDD/DLB subgroup. This correlated with impairments on measures of executive control. Regression analyses related the working memory deficit during ambiguous sentence processing to significant cortical thinning in frontal and parietal regions. These findings emphasize the role of prefrontal disease in the executive limitations that interfere with processing ambiguous sentences in LBSD.