Verb Bias Research Articles

Are cleft sentence structures more difficult to process?

This study compares the processing of cleft structures against that of monoclausal sentences using event-related potential (ERP). We aim to understand how syntactic complexity is processed by comparing the neural response to cleft and single-clause sentences with identical verb phrases, controlling for verb bias frequency effects. 60 participants were tested, and we presented 100 cleft and 100 monoclausal sentences, balanced for active and passive verb usage. The P600 component, which is associated with syntactic complexity, was examined to assess the processing load of cleft structures. Results showed that cleft structures incur a greater processing load, as indicated by a P600, compared to monoclausal sentences. This indexed the increased difficulty of processing the additional syntactic operation required to parse cleft sentences. These findings echo the results of behavioral studies of sentence comprehension on clinical populations.

Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech

This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multiple methods and across a diverse collection of language populations. However, past evidence bearing on a noun bias in Tseltal learners has been mixed. Tseltal grammatical features and child–caregiver interactional patterns dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs, leading to the prediction of a diminished noun bias and perhaps even an early predominance of verbs. We here analyze the use of noun and verb stems in children’s spontaneous speech from egocentric daylong recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 and 4;4. We find weak to no evidence for a noun bias using two separate analytical approaches on the same data; one analysis yields a preliminary suggestion of a flipped outcome (i.e. a verb bias). We discuss the implications of these findings for broader theories of learning bias in early lexical development.

Lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory in sentence-like lists.

We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated. Participants were more likely to recall words in the correct position when presented with a verb over a noun in the verb position, a good dative verb over an intransitive verb in the verb position, and an animate noun over an inanimate noun in the subject noun position. These results demonstrate that interactions between words and their context in the form of lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory.

Updating constructions: additive effects of prior and current experience during sentence production.

While much earlier work has indicated that prior verb bias from lifelong language experience influences language processing, recent findings highlight the fact that verb biases induced during lab-based exposure sessions also influence processing. We investigated the nature of updating, i.e.,how prior and current experience might interact in guiding subsequent sentence production. Participants underwent a short training session where we manipulated the bias of known English dative verbs. The prior bias of each verb for the double-object (DO) versus the prepositional-object (PO) dative was estimated using a corpus. Current verb bias was counterbalanced and controlled experimentally. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic models of participants' responses (DO or PO) during subsequent free-choice production showed that both the prior and current verb biases affected speakers' construction choice. These effects were additive and not interactive, contrary to the prediction from error-based learning models. Semantic similarity to other verbs and their experimentally manipulated biases influenced sentence production, consistent with item-based analogy and exemplar theory. These results shed light on the potential mechanisms underlying language updating and the adaptation of sentence production to ongoing experience.

L2 Proficiency Effects on the Use of Verb Bias Information

This study investigated whether L2 proficiency affected how L2 learners used verb bias information in their written production. Two groups of high proficiency and low proficiency L2 learners participated in a sentence completion task with direct object (DO) bias verbs, equi (EQ) bias verbs and sentential complement (SC) bias verbs. The results showed a significant difference between the two L2 learner groups in the percentage of DO and SC sentence completions preferred for each verb type. The low proficiency group used more DO structures and fewer SC structures for all three types of verbs compared to the high proficiency group. However, despite the low proficiency group’s preference for the DO sentence structure, significant correlations between the verb bias strength index of each verb and number of DO/SC sentence completions were found for both the low and high proficiency groups. These results suggest that while low proficiency L2 learners generally prefer to use the structurally more minimal DO structure as opposed to the SC structure, they are sensitive to verb bias properties and are able to use this information in their written production.

Implicit Causality and Pronoun Resolution in Intersubjective Discourse Relations.

Interpersonal verbs like disappoint and praise in Lucy disappointed/praised Mary because she… bias the potential cause of the event to one of the antecedent noun phrases (henceforth NPs) (e.g., Lucy for disappoint whereas Mary for praise). Using Chinese as its materials, this study investigated how verb-based implicit causality affects online pronoun resolution in backward concession (e.g., Lucy disappointed/praised Mary although she…), an intersubjective discourse relation where the subordinate although-clause forms an indirect relationship with the preceding main clause. Experiment 1 was a baseline experiment with the typical structure where implicit causality is found to be effective, i.e., backward causality. Results showed a clear modulation effect of implicit causality on pronoun resolution such that as verb bias strength decreases, participants were faster in processing sentences that disambiguate the pronoun to the verb-inconsistent NP. However, this modulation effect was not observed in Experiment 2 where we used the same verbs but replaced because with although. There was no preference for the pronoun to be disambiguated toward the verb-consistent NP or the verb-inconsistent NP in backward concession. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 where we directly compared causal and concessive relations. We suggest that the absent effect of verb-based implicit causality in backward concession could be attributed to the intersubjective nature of the concessive relation. Discourse devices such as although indicate speakers’ subjective perspective and comprehenders are able to quickly accommodate the speaker’s point of view during online discourse processing.

Error-based structure prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from verb bias effects in a visual-world structural priming paradigm for Mandarin Chinese.

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is for instance biased toward the prepositional object (PO) structure occurs with an unexpected double object (DO) structure. However, it is unclear whether this mechanism also holds for language comprehension, especially for languages like Mandarin Chinese, which arguably depends strongly on semantics to predict syntax in comprehension. Experiment 1 was a norming study (N = 367) that measured the biases (DO vs. PO) of 48 Mandarin Chinese dative verbs. Experiment 2 (N = 72) crossed verb bias (DO-bias or PO-bias) and structure (DO or PO) of prime sentences in a visual-world paradigm, to examine whether Mandarin comprehenders show an inverse preference effect. The priming effect is expressed as the proportion of looks to the predicted referent (i.e., the recipient after a DO-prime, the theme after a PO-prime), for two critical time windows during target sentence processing: the verb and the first syllable of the first postverbal noun (which was identical in theme and recipient). There was priming in both time windows, even though the verb differed between prime and target. Importantly, there was an inverse preference effect (i.e., stronger priming after a DO prime with a PO-biased verb than with a DO-biased verb) in the second time window. These results provide evidence for an error-based structure prediction system in comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Access to verb bias and plausibility information during syntactic processing in adult Spanish-English bilinguals.

In two experiments, we examine how proficient second language speakers integrate verb bias and plausibility information during online sentence comprehension. Spanish-English speakers and native English speakers read sentences in English in which a post-verbal noun phrase (NP) could be interpreted as a direct object or a sentential subject. To examine the role of verb bias, the post-verbal NP was preceded by a verb that is preferentially followed by a direct object (DO-bias verbs) or a sentential complement (SC-bias verbs). To assess the role of plausibility, the semantic fit between the verb and the post-verbal NP was either congruent or incongruent with the direct object interpretation. The results show that both second language speakers and native speakers used verb bias information to assign a grammatical role to the post-verbal ambiguous NP with small differences. Syntactic revision of an initially incorrect DO interpretation was facilitated by the presence of an implausible NP.

Use of Verb Bias and Complementizer Cues in L2 Written Production

본 논문은 제2 언어 학습자의 영어 글쓰기에 사용되는 동사 편향 정보와 보문소 that의 역할을 살펴본다. 영어를 제2 언어로 학습하는 한국어 화자를 대상으로 주어와 동사로 시작하는 문장을 완성하는 실험과제를 진행하였다. 실험에 사용된 30개의 영어동사는 강한 ‘직접목적어 편향성’부터 강한 ‘보문절 편향성’까지 다양하게 포함되었다. 실험 결과, 영어 학습자들이 사용한 문장 구조와 각 문장에 사용된 동사 편향 정보 사이에 유의미한 상관관계가 발견되었으며, 직접목적어 편향성이 강할수록 직접목적어 구조를, 보문절 편향성이 강할수록 보문절 구조를 선택하여 문장을 완성하였다. 이 결과는 피험자인 제2 언어 학습자들이 영어 글쓰기를 할 때, 원어민 화자와 유사한 패턴으로 동사 편향 정보를 활용한다는 것을 보여준다. 그러나 동사 편향 정보와 보문소 that의 상호작용에 있어서는 기존의 원어민 데이터와는 다르게, 강한 보문절 편향의 동사일수록 보문소를 사용하고, 반대로 직접목적어 편향의 동사일수록 보문소를 생략하는 경향을 보였다. 이 논문은 실험 결과를 언어습득의 ‘노출기반이론’에 근거하여 제2 언어 학습자와 원어민 영어 화자의 차이점에 대하여 논의한다.

Pronoun production and comprehension in American Sign Language: the interaction of space, grammar, and semantics

ABSTRACT Spoken language research has investigated how pronouns are influenced by grammar and semantics/pragmatics. In contrast, sign language research has focused on unambiguous pronominal reference arising from spatial co-reference. However, understanding signed pronouns contributes to cross-linguistically valid models of pronoun production and comprehension. In two sentence-continuation experiments, the present study investigated how linguistic use of space (modality-specific), antecedent grammatical role and verb implicit causality bias (modality-independent) affect American Sign Language (ASL) pronouns. Production of pronouns was determined by antecedent grammatical role, and overt pronouns were marginally more frequent for referents articulated in specific areas of signing space compared to neutral space. Signers interpreted pronouns using spatial information and, notably, verb bias, despite spatial co-reference supposedly removing the ambiguity that verb bias resolves. These findings demonstrate that ASL pronouns are subject to modality-independent factors, despite their use of space, and lend support to models of pronominal reference positing a production/comprehension asymmetry.

Individual Differences in Print Exposure Predict Use of Implicit Causality in Pronoun Comprehension and Referential Prediction.

In three experiments, we measured individual patterns of pronoun comprehension (Experiments 1 and 2) and referential prediction (Experiment 3) in implicit causality (IC) contexts and compared these with a measure of participants’ print exposure (Author Recognition Task; ART). Across all three experiments, we found that ART interacted with verb bias, such that participants with higher scores demonstrated a stronger semantic bias, i.e., they tended to select the pronoun or predict the re-mention of the character that was congruent with an implicit cause interpretation. This suggests that print exposure changes the way language is processed at the discourse level, and in particular, that it is related to implicit cause sensitivity.

Verb bias and semantic persistence effects in L2 ambiguity resolution

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2 English as well as 17 English natives in eye-tracking during reading and off-line comprehension. In off-line comprehension, neither natives nor L2 learners show verb bias effects, suggesting that semantic persistence of initial misinterpretations arises independently of lexical preferences. In contrast, reading times show that all groups are immediately sensitive to verb bias on-line, with L1 differences in how strongly verb bias affects garden-pathing. Unlike natives, however, L2 learners do not use verb bias to overcome semantic persistence to complete reanalysis in later segments of the sentence. We argue that, in spite of their initial sensitivity to verb bias in modulating garden paths, L2 readers suffer from processing limitations that constrain their ability to retrieve and integrate multiple sources of information for reanalysis. Our study confirms that reanalysis constitutes a key area of native versus non-native differences in L2 sentence processing.

The Effects of Verb Bias in the Written Production of English Sentences by L2 Learners

The Effects of Verb Bias in the Written Production of English Sentences by L2 Learners

Scolding the child who threw the scissors: Shaping discourse expectations by restricting referents

ABSTRACT Coherence relations are often assumed to hold between clauses, but restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are usually not granted discourse segment status because they are syntactically and conceptually integrated in their matrix clauses. This paper investigates whether coherence relations can be inferred between restrictive RCs and their matrix clauses. Three experiments provide converging evidence that restrictive RCs can indeed play a role at the discourse level and should not categorically be excluded from receiving discourse segment status in discourse annotation practices. At the same time, the studies provide new insights into implicit causality verb biases, specifically about next-mention biases in concessive coherence relations, and expectations about discourse structure, upcoming referents, and upcoming coherence relations.

Written All Over Their Faces: Neutrality and Nonverbal Expression in Sandy Hook Coverage

During crises, it’s challenging for journalists to keep their emotions out of reports. While broadcast journalists try to keep linguistic messages neutral, nonverbal behaviors are difficult to conceal. Graber’s stages of crisis coverage theory discusses routines of covering crisis and preventing verbal bias but doesn’t examine nonverbal bias. This study examines the neutrality of nonverbal expressions conveyed during the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School through the lens of the stages of crisis coverage theory. This study provides insight for understanding the responses news organizations should have in terms of crisis coverage. By examining the ways that the influence of emotional events have on the nonverbal expressivity of journalists during crisis, researchers can better understand the ritualization of the nonverbal neutrality standards of the profession and make recommendations on potential ways that the field could adapt their current crisis plans to consider nonverbal communication displays more explicitly. Further, by combining crisis planning, media ritualization practices, and journalistic nonverbal expression, this research provides further insight into how performance by media during a crisis can influence cultural meaning about the event for viewers. The findings in this study also suggest the stages of crisis coverage theory was not upheld by broadcasters in this context, calling for reexamination of the theory’s uses and applications to all crisis coverage.

Nouns and Verbs in Parent Input in American Sign Language during Interaction among Deaf Dyads

ABSTRACT Parent input during interaction with young children varies across languages and contexts with regard to the relative number of words from different lexical categories, particularly nouns and verbs. Previous work has focused on spoken language input. Little is known about the lexical composition of parent input in American Sign Language (ASL). We investigated parent input in ASL in a sample of deaf mothers interacting with their young deaf children (n = 7) in a free play setting. Children ranged in age from 21 to 39 months (M = 31 months). A 20-minute portion of each interaction was transcribed and coded for a range of linguistic features in maternal input including utterance length, sign types and tokens, proportion of nouns and verbs, and functions of points. We found evidence for a significant verb bias in maternal input; mothers produced more verb tokens and unique verb types than any other word class. Verbs were produced more than twice as often as nouns (36% vs 17% of all tokens) and appeared in a higher proportion of utterances than nouns (57% vs. 31% of all utterances). Points were frequent in the input, often serving as pronouns replacing common or proper nouns. Maternal noun and verb tokens increased in frequency with child age and vocabulary. These findings provide an initial step in understanding the lexical properties of maternal input during free play interactions in ASL.

Individual Differences in Verb Bias Sensitivity in Children and Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.

A number of experiments support the hypothetical utility of statistical information for language learning and processing among both children and adults. However, tasks in these studies are often very general, and only a few include populations with developmental language disorder (DLD). We wanted to determine whether a stronger relationship might be shown when the measure of statistical learning is chosen for its relevance to the language task when including a substantial number of participants with DLD. The language ability we measured was sensitivity to verb bias – the likelihood of a verb to appear with a certain argument or interpretation. A previous study showed adults with DLD were less sensitive to verb bias than their typical peers. Verb bias sensitivity had not yet been tested in children with DLD. In Study 1, 49 children, ages 7–9 years, 17 of whom were classified as having DLD, completed a task designed to measure sensitivity to verb bias through implicit and explicit measures. We found children with and without DLD showed sensitivity to verb bias in implicit but not explicit measures, with no differences between groups. In Study 2, we used a multiverse approach to investigate whether individual differences in statistical learning predicted verb bias sensitivity in these participants as well as in a dataset of adult participants. Our analysis revealed no evidence of a relationship between statistical learning and verb bias sensitivity in children, which was not unexpected given we found no group differences in Study 1. Statistical learning predicted sensitivity to verb bias as measured through explicit measures in adults, though results were not robust. These findings suggest that verb bias may still be relatively unstable in school age children, and thus may not play the same role in sentence processing in children as in adults. It would also seem that individuals with DLD may not be using the same mechanisms during processing as their typically developing (TD) peers in adulthood. Thus, statistical information may differ in relevance for language processing in individuals with and without DLD.

The influence of syntactic expectations on reading comprehension is malleable and strategic: An eye-tracking study of English dative alternation.

Language processing is incremental and inherently predictive. Against this theoretic backdrop, we investigated the role of upcoming structural information in the comprehension of the English dative alternation. The use of eye-tracking enabled us to examine both the time course and locus of the effect associated with (a) structural expectations based on a lifetime of experience with language, and (b) rapid adaptation of the reader to the local statistics of the experiment. We quantified (a) as a verb subcategorization bias toward dative alternatives, and (b) as distributional biases in the syntactic input during the experiment. A reliable facilitatory effect of the verb bias was only observed in the double-object datives and only in the disambiguation region of the second object. Furthermore, structural priming led to an earlier locus of the verb bias effect, suggesting an interaction between (a) and (b). Our results offer a new outlook on the utilization of syntactic expectations during reading, in conjunction with rapid adaptation to the immediate linguistic environment. We demonstrate that this utilization is both malleable and strategic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Deficits in the Use of Verb Bias Information in Real-Time Processing by College Students With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed similar sensitivity to verb bias information during real-time sentence processing as typically developing (TD) peers. Method Seventeen college students with DLD and 16 TD college students participated in a mouse-tracking experiment that utilized the visual world paradigm to examine real-time sentence processing. In experimental trials, participants chose 1 of 2 pictured interpretations of a sentence. Measures of interest were the choice of interpretation and the amount of competition from the unchosen picture as measured by mouse curvature. Results Choice of interpretation and mouse movements by college students with DLD suggested less sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers. Conclusion College students with DLD showed less evidence of sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers in this task. Their performance may reflect the use of compensatory processing strategies and may be related to poor comprehension abilities often observed in this population.

Late Victorian Novels, Bad Dialogue, and Talk

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment that endure into the present. Through examining two late Victorian novels specifically panned for their attempts to include talk's embodied situatedness into dialogue—George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901)—this essay motivates a prior literary historical moment (before dialogue's definitive separation from talk) to consider a continuing verbal bias in our own critical and creative practices. This essay speculates that an embarrassment about embodied procedures continues to underlie our sense of dialogue as a less sophisticated narratological category, and that "best practices" in creative writing problematically erase the body when mandating that dialogue must show interiority or further novelistic action. Ultimately, unlike "orality," talk compels a confrontation with dialogue that brings attention to historical and present ways in which the notion of speech is inseparable from the power dynamics of embodied relation.