Language and cognitive processes最新文献

{"title":"Quantitative methods in syntax/semantics research: A response to Sprouse and Almeida (2013)","authors":"E. Gibson, S. Piantadosi, Evelina Fedorenko","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2012.704385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.704385","url":null,"abstract":"Sprouse and Almeida (S&A) present quantitative results that suggest that intuitive judgments utilised in syntax research are generally correct in two-condition comparisons: the sentence type that is presented as “good/grammatical” is usually rated better than the sentence type that is presented as “bad/ungrammatical” in controlled experiments. Although these evaluations of intuitive relative judgments are valuable, they do not justify the use of nonquantitative linguistic methods. We argue that objectivity is a universal value in science that should be adopted by linguistics. In addition, the reliability measures that S&A report are not sufficient for developing sophisticated linguistic theories. Furthermore, quantitative methods yield two additional benefits: consistency of judgments across many pairs of judgments; and an understanding of the relative effect sizes across sets of judgments. We illustrate these points with an experiment that demonstrates five clear levels of acceptability. Finally, we observe that S&A's experiments—where only two authors evaluated 10 years' worth of journal articles and one standard textbook within a few months—further emphasise one of our critical original points: conducting behavioural experiments is in many respects easy and fast with the advent of online research tools like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Given the current ease of performing quantitative experiments (using a platform like Mechanical Turk) and the clear limitations of not doing so, linguistic hypotheses should be evaluated quantitatively whenever it is feasible.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2012.704385","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59135713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Predictive processing of syntactic structure: Sluicing and ellipsis in real-time sentence processing","authors":"Masaya Yoshida, M. Dickey, P. Sturt","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.622905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.622905","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the prediction of syntactic structure during sentence processing, using constructions that temporarily allow a sluicing interpretation in English. Making use of two well-known properties of sluicing and pronoun interpretation—connectivity effects and the local antecedent requirement on reflexives, respectively—we show that (1) the parser chooses a sluicing structure over other possible structures when sluicing is a possibility, and (2) the structure which the parser posits for sluicing involves detailed hierarchical syntactic structure. A self-paced reading experiment and three offline experiments (two acceptability rating studies and a sentence completion study) find evidence that readers immediately try to associate a reflexive pronoun embedded inside a wh-phrase with a potential antecedent in the preceding clause. However, this association is made only if a sluicing structure is a possible continuation of the sentence. This finding suggests that readers actively anticipated a sluicing structure when it was grammatically permissible, and that this structure is sufficiently detailed to license reflexive binding. This result adds to the increasing evidence that comprehenders make detailed predictions regarding upcoming linguistic structure.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.622905","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59135090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The neurophysiological correlate to grammatical function reanalysis in Swedish","authors":"Thomas Hörberg, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Petter Kallioinen","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.651345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.651345","url":null,"abstract":"Language comprehension is assumed to proceed incrementally, and comprehenders commit to initial interpretations even in the absence of unambiguous information. Initial ambiguous object arguments are therefore preferably interpreted as subjects, an interpretation that needs to be revised towards an object initial interpretation once the disambiguating information is encountered. Most accounts of such grammatical function reanalyses assume that they involve phrase structure revisions, and do not differ from other syntactic reanalyses. A number of studies using measurements of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide evidence for this view by showing that both reanalysis types engender similar neurophysiological responses (e.g., P600 effects). Others have claimed that grammatical function reanalyses rather involve revisions of the mapping of thematic roles to argument noun phrases (NPs). In line with this, it has been shown that grammatical function reanalysis during spoken language comprehension engenders a N400 effect, an effect which has been shown to correlate with general problems in the mapping of thematic roles to argument NPs in a number of languages. This study investigated the ERP correlate to grammatical function reanalysis in Swedish. Postverbal NPs that disambiguated the interpretation of object-topicalised sentences towards an object-initial reading engendered a N400 effect with a local, right-parietal distribution. This “reanalysis N400” effect provides further support for the view that grammatical function reanalysis is functionally distinct from syntactic reanalyses and rather involves a revision of the mapping of thematic roles to the sentence arguments. Postverbal subject pronouns in object-topicalised sentences were also found to engender an enhanced P300 wave in comparison to object pronouns, an effect which seems to depend on the overall infrequency of object-topicalised constructions. This finding provides support for the view that the “reanalysis N400” in some cases can be attenuated by a task-related P300 component.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.651345","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59134968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When does Iconicity in Sign Language Matter?","authors":"Cristina Baus,&nbsp;Manuel Carreiras,&nbsp;Karen Emmorey","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.620374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.620374","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We examined whether iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL) enhances translation performance for new learners and proficient signers. Fifteen hearing nonsigners and 15 proficient ASL-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task and a production translation task. Nonsigners were taught 28 ASL verbs (14 iconic; 14 non-iconic) prior to performing these tasks. Only new learners benefited from sign iconicity, recognizing iconic translations faster and more accurately and exhibiting faster forward (English-ASL) and backward (ASL-English) translation times for iconic signs. In contrast, proficient ASL-English bilinguals exhibited slower recognition and translation times for iconic signs. We suggest iconicity aids memorization in the early stages of adult sign language learning, but for fluent L2 signers, iconicity interacts with other variables that slow translation (specifically, the iconic signs had more translation equivalents than the non-iconic signs). Iconicity may also have slowed translation performance by forcing conceptual mediation for iconic signs, which is slower than translating via direct lexical links.</p>","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.620374","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40238472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments.","authors":"Philip Hofmeister,&nbsp;T Florian Jaeger,&nbsp;Inbal Arnon,&nbsp;Ivan A Sag,&nbsp;Neal Snider","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.572401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.572401","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a <i>wh</i>-phrase in front of a syntactically \"superior\" <i>wh</i>-phrase in multiple <i>w</i>h-questions, e.g. <i>What did who buy?</i> More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g. <i>Which toys did which parents buy?</i> Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of <i>wh</i>-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the <i>wh</i>-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty.</p>","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.572401","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40234554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"D-linking or set-restriction? Processing Which-questions in Dutch","authors":"J. Donkers, J. Hoeks, L. Stowe","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","url":null,"abstract":"Research on Wh-questions suggests that Which questions are harder to process than Who questions (e.g., Who/Which athlete won the competition?). According to the Discourse (D)-linking Hypothesis, Which-questions differ from Who-questions in that Which questions need a link to a preceding discourse, while Who questions do not. However, this difference in processing may also be caused by differences in “set-restriction.” Who is much less restrictive in the set of potential referents it presupposes than Which N (e.g., Which athlete). A self-paced reading study investigated how Who and Which N questions were processed compared to questions involving the generic Which person, which refer to the same relatively unrestrictive referential set as Who. Our results showed that Which N questions were significantly more difficult than Which person or Who questions in object initial structures, supporting the hypothesis that increased processing cost for Which should be explained by a mechanism of set-restriction inherent to Which N questions. Additionally we found that the syntactic role of the possible referents in the discourse context affects question processing before the readers encountered disambiguating information.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59134600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects.","authors":"Jesse A Harris,&nbsp;Charles Clifton,&nbsp;Lyn Frazier","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2012.679663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.679663","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, e.g., <i>The army was mostly in the capital</i>, where <i>mostly</i> may quantify over individuals or parts (<i>Most of the army was in the capital</i>) or over times (<i>The army was in the capital most of the time</i>). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times (Majewski 2006, in preparation), discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favors the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb <i>mostly</i> (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing.</p>","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2012.679663","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"32757900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alice's adventures in <i>um</i>-derland: Psycholinguistic sources of variation in disfluency production.","authors":"Scott H Fraundorf,&nbsp;Duane G Watson","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2013.832785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.832785","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study tests the hypothesis that three common types of disfluency (fillers, silent pauses, and repeated words) reflect variance in what strategies are available to the production system for responding to difficulty in language production. Participants' speech in a storytelling paradigm was coded for the three disfluency types. Repeats occurred most often when difficult material was already being produced and could be repeated, but fillers and silent pauses occurred most when difficult material was still being planned. Fillers were associated only with conceptual difficulties, consistent with the proposal that they reflect a communicative signal whereas silent pauses and repeats were also related to lexical and phonological difficulties. These differences are discussed in terms of different strategies available to the language production system.</p>","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2013.832785","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"32766672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Some arguments and nonarguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena","authors":"C. Phillips","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2010.530960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.530960","url":null,"abstract":"Many syntactic phenomena have received competing accounts, either in terms of formal grammatical mechanisms, or in terms of independently motivated properties of language processing mechanisms (“reductionist” accounts). A variety of different types of argument have been put forward in efforts to distinguish these competing accounts. This article critically examines a number of arguments that have been offered as evidence in favour of formal or reductionist analyses, and concludes that some types of argument are more decisive than others. It argues that evidence from graded acceptability effects and from isomorphism between acceptability judgements and on-line comprehension profiles are less decisive. In contrast, clearer conclusions can be drawn from cases of overgeneration, where there is a discrepancy between acceptability judgements and the representations that are briefly constructed on-line, and from tests involving individual differences in cognitive capacity. Based on these arguments, the article concludes that a formal grammatical account is better supported in some domains, and that a reductionist account fares better in other domains. Phenomena discussed include island constraints, agreement attraction, constraints on anaphora, and comparatives.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2010.530960","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59134084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Processing Chinese relative clauses in context","authors":"E. Gibson, H.-H. Iris Wu","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2010.536656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.536656","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature for the comparison between Chinese SRCs and ORCs is due to potential temporary ambiguity in these constructions in null contexts. By placing the materials in contexts biased towards a relative clause (RC) interpretation, we limit the effects of temporary ambiguity. The results of the experiment demonstrate that SRCs are read more slowly than ORCs in supportive contexts. These results provide evidence for working memory-based sentence processing theories whereby processing difficulty increases for connecting sentence elements that are further apart. Some convergent evidence that strengthens these conclusions comes from recent research on aphasic populations where a dissociation between English and Chinese RC processing has been revealed: whereas English aphasic patients have more difficulty with ORCs and Chinese aphasic patients have more difficulty with SRCs (Su, Lee, & Chung, 2007). Taken together, these results support the idea that sentence processing is constrained by working memory limitations.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2010.536656","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59134196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}