Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. UnderGrillo’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 byHornstein (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). (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Language and speech depend on a relatively well defined neural circuitry, located predominantly in the left hemisphere. In this article, I discuss the origin of the speech circuit in early humans, as an expansion of an auditory-vocal articulatory network that took place after the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee. I will attempt to converge this perspective with aspects of the Mirror System Hypothesis, particularly those related to the emergence of a meaningful grammar in human communication. Basically, the strengthening of (...) auditory-vocal connectivity via the arcuate fasciculus and related tracts generated an expansion of working memory capacity for vocalizations, that was key for learning complex utterances. This process was concomitant with the development of a robust interface with visual working memory, both in the dorsal and ventral streams of auditory and visual processing. This enabled the bidirectional translation of sequential codes into hierarchical visual representations, through the development of a multimodal interface between both systems. (shrink)

There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000 ; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005 ). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013 ). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy ( 2008 ) or (...) by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002 ). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. (shrink)

We present computational modeling results based on a self‐paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k‐fold cross‐validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding‐based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval‐based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open‐ended responses, so that (...) both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Normals display selective deficits in morphology and syntax under adverse processing conditions. Digit loads do not impair processing of passives and object relatives but do impair processing of grammatical morphemes. Perceptual degradation and temporal compression selectively impair several aspects of grammar, including passives and object relatives. Hence we replicate Caplan & Waters's specific findings but reach opposite conclusions, based on wider evidence.

This study investigates the role of locality (a task/material-related variable), demographic factors (age, education, and sex), cognitive capacities (verbal working memory [WM], verbal short-term memory [STM], speed of processing [SOP], and inhibition), and morphosyntactic category (time reference and grammatical aspect) in verb-related morphosyntactic production (VRMP). A sentence completion task tapping production of time reference and grammatical aspect in local and nonlocal configurations, and cognitive tasks measuring verbal WM capacity, verbal STM capacity, motor SOP, perceptual SOP, and inhibition were administered to (...) 200 neurotypical Greek-speaking participants, aged between 19 and 80 years. We fitted generalized linear mixed-effects models and performed path analyses. Significant main effects of locality, age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and morphosyntactic category emerged. Production of time reference and aspect did not interact with any of the significant factors (i.e., age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and locality), and locality did not interact with any memory system. Path analyses revealed that the relationships between age and VRMP, and between education and VRMP were partly mediated by verbal WM; and the relationship between verbal WM and VRMP was partly mediated by perceptual SOP. Results suggest that subject-, task/material- and morphosyntactic category-specific factors determine accuracy performance on VRMP; and the effects of age, education, and verbal WM on VRMP are partly indirect. The fact that there was a significant main effect of verbal WM but not of verbal STM on accuracy performance in the VRMP task suggests that it is predominantly the processing component (and not the storage component) of verbal WM that supports VRMP. Lastly, we interpret the results as suggesting that VRMP is also supported by a procedural memory system whose efficiency might be reflected in years of formal education. (shrink)

Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory. Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the (...) comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia, we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types. (shrink)

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of generative capacity. More specifically, the paper demonstrates that the computational restrictiveness imposed by Tree Adjoining Grammar provides important insights into the nature of human grammatical knowledge.