Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement 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 by Hornstein, 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. (shrink)

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g. ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative (...) adverb never (e.g. The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences was studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights on the complexity of multiple negation and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability. (shrink)

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person who everyone who talks to likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person everyone (...) who talks to likes, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy.These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all?Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations?Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy?The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)

Clark highlights a neglected issue in research on language use: the process by which speakers and addressees anchor utterances with respect to individual entities in their common ground. In his review, he identifies the challenges linked to investigations of anchoring, but also displays the pitfalls of evading it.

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerge gradually by piggybacking on (...) domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty. (shrink)

Information‐theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation‐based view is not limited to syntactic information alone. The present study combines structural and non‐structural information in unified models of word‐by‐word sentence processing difficulty. Using probabilistic minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), we extend expectation‐based models to include (...) frequency information about noun phrase animacy. Entropy reductions derived from these grammars faithfully reflect the asymmetry between subject and object relatives (Staub, 2010; Staub, Dillon, & Clifton, 2017), as well as the effect of animacy on the measured difficulty profile (Lowder & Gordon, 2012; Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002). Visualizing probability distributions on the remaining alternatives at particular parser states allows us to explore new, linguistically plausible interpretations for the observed processing asymmetries, including the way that expectations about the relativized argument influence the processing of particular types of relative clauses (Wagers & Pendleton, 2016). (shrink)

In this paper, we present an overview of existing parallel corpora for Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) in different languages focusing on the approach adopted for their construction. We make the main distinction between manual and (semi)–automatic approaches in order to investigate in which respect complex and simple texts vary and whether and how the observed modifications may depend on the underlying approach. To this end, we perform a two-level comparison on Italian corpora, since this is the only language, with the (...) exception of English, for which there are large parallel resources derived through the two approaches considered. The first level of comparison accounts for the main types of sentence transformations occurring in the simplification process, the second one examines the results of a linguistic profiling analysis based on Natural Language Processing techniques and carried out on the original and the simple version of the same texts. For both levels of analysis, we chose to focus our discussion mostly on sentence transformations and linguistic characteristics that pertain to the morpho-syntactic and syntactic structure of the sentence. (shrink)

Research investigating the brain basis of language comprehension has associated the left anterior temporal lobe with sentence-level combinatorics. Using magnetoencephalography, we test the parsing strategy implemented in this brain region. The number of incremental parse steps from a predictive left-corner parsing strategy that is supported by psycholinguistic research is compared with those from a less-predictive strategy. We test for a correlation between parse steps and source-localized MEG activity recorded while participants read a story. Left-corner parse steps correlated with activity in (...) the left ATL around 350–500 ms after word onset. No other correlations specific to sentence comprehension were observed. These data indicate that the left ATL engages in combinatoric processing that is well characterized by a predictive left-corner parsing strategy. (shrink)

This study investigates the performance of 21 monolingual and 56 bilingual children aged 5;6-9;0 on German-LITMUS-sentence-repetition (SRT; Hamann et al., 2013) and nonword-repetition-tasks (NWRT; Grimm et al., 2014), which were constructed according to the LITMUS-principles (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings; Armon-Lotem et al., 2015). Both tasks incorporate complex structures shown to be cross-linguistically challenging for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and aim at minimizing bias against bilingual children while still being indicative of the presence of language impairment across (...) language combinations. Given the great variability in bilingual language exposure and the potential effect of language experience on language performance in bilingual children, we examined whether background variables related to bilingualism, particularly, the degree language dominance as measured by relative amount of use and exposure, could compromise the diagnostic accuracy of the German-LITMUS-SRT and NWRT. We further investigated whether a combination of the two tasks provides better diagnostic accurracy. To address this, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, the Partitioning-Around-Medoids (PAM), for deriving a clinical category for the children as ±language-impaired based on performance scores on SRT and/or NWRT while withholding information about their clinical status based on standardized assessment in L1/L2. Subsequently, we calculated diagnostic accuracy and investigated which background variables (age of onset, length of exposure, degree of language-dominance, socio-economic-status, and risk factors for SLI) best explained clinical-group-membership yielded from the PAM-analysis based on NWRT and/or SRT scores. Results show that although language-dominance influences the performance of bilingual typically-developing children, especially in the SRT, the diagnostic accuracy of the tools is not compromised by language dominance: while risk factors for SLI were significant predictors for clinical group membership in all models, language dominance did not contribute at all to explaining clinical cluster membership as typically-developing or SLI based on any of the combinations of the SRT and NWRT variables. Additionally, results confirm that a combination of SRT scored by correct target structure and the structurally more complex language-dependent part of the NWRT yields better diagnostic accuracy than single measures and is only sensitive for risk factors for SLI and not to dominance levels or SES. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But (...) a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

In past studies, the few quantitative approaches to discourse structure were mostly confined to the presentation of the frequency of discourse relations. However, quantitative approaches should take into account both hierarchical and relational layers in the discourse structure. This study considers these factors and addresses the issue of how discourse relations and discourse units are related. It draws upon the available corpora of discourse structure ) from a new perspective. Since an RST tree can be converted into a syntactic dependency (...) tree, the data extracted from the RST-DT can be useful for calculating the discourse distance in much the same way as syntactic dependency distance is calculated. Discourse distance is also applicable to measuring the depth of the human processing of discourse. Furthermore, the data derived from the RST-DT are also easily converted into network data. This study finds that discourse structure has its discourse distance minimum and each type of RST relations has its range of discourse distance. The frequency distribution of discourse data basically follows the power law on several levels, while a network approach reveals how discourse units are arranged spatially in regular patterns. The two methods are mutually complementary in revealing the interaction between discourse relations and discourse units in a comprehensive manner, as well as in revealing how people process and comprehend discourse dynamically. Accordingly, we propose merging the two methods so as to yield a computational model for assessing discourse complexity and comprehension. (shrink)

We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory. Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using (...) the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items. Reading time patterns from both experiments showed facilitative effects of BEI within and beyond RC regions, and delayed facilitative effects of classifiers, suggesting that cues that occur before a clear signal of an upcoming RC can help Chinese comprehenders to anticipate RC structures. The data patterns are not predicted by the DLT, but they are consistent with the predictions of experience-based theories. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 4 Seiten: 613-632.

This study investigates how filler-gap dependencies associated with subject position are formed in online sentence comprehension. Since Crain and Fodor, “filled-gap” studies have provided evidence that the parser actively seeks to associate a wh-filler with a gap in direct object position of a sentence wherever possible; the evidence that this same process applies for subject position, is, however, more limited. We examine the processing of complement clauses, finding that wh dependency formation is actively attempted at embedded subject position, unless, however, (...) the embedded clause contains a complementizer. The absence of the dependency formation in the latter case demonstrates that the complementizer-trace effect is, like syntactic island constraints, immediately operative in online structure building. (shrink)

We investigate the processing of wh questions in Niuean, a VSO ergative–absolutive Polynesian language. We use visual‐world eye tracking to examine how preference for subject or object dependencies is affected (a) by case marking of the subject (ergative vs. absolutive) and object (absolutive vs. oblique), and (b) by the transitivity of the verb (whether the object is obligatory). We find that Niuean exhibits (a) an effect of case, whereby dependencies of arguments with absolutive case (whether subjects or objects) are preferred (...) over dependencies of arguments with ergative or oblique case, and (b) an effect of transitivity, whereby dependencies of obligatory objects (i.e., of transitive verbs) are preferred over dependencies of optional objects (i.e., of intransitive verbs). These results constitute evidence against theories that appeal to a universal subject advantage, or to the linear distance between filler and gap. Instead, the effect of case is consistent with a frequency‐based account: Because absolutive case has a wider syntactic distribution than ergative or oblique, absolutive dependencies are easier to process. The effect of transitivity reflects sensitivity of the parser to whether or not an argument is obligatory. We propose that these two strategies could be unified if the parser prefers dependencies with arguments that are more likely to materialize. (shrink)

Music can be described as sequences of events that are structured in pitch and time. Studying music processing provides insight into how complex event sequences are learned, perceived, and represented by the brain. Given the temporal nature of sound, expectations, structural integration, and cognitive sequencing are central in music perception (i.e., which sounds are most likely to come next and at what moment should they occur?). This paper focuses on similarities in music and language cognition research, showing that music cognition (...) research provides insight into the understanding of not only music processing but also language processing and the processing of other structured stimuli. The hypothesis of shared resources between music and language processing and of domain-general dynamic attention has motivated the development of research to test music as a means to stimulate sensory, cognitive, and motor processes. (shrink)

In this review, we summarize studies investigating comprehension of three core grammatical structures (Subject-Verb-Object word order, grammatical aspect and wh-questions) in diverse samples of Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD, all utilizing the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) paradigm. Results showed that children with ASD, though they were delayed in chronological age and expressive language (including significantly lower vocabulary production scores), acquired various grammatical constructions similarly to their typically developing peers. Moreover, Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD demonstrated similar acquisition patterns of these three core (...) grammatical structures, as has been reported in previous IPL studies among English-acquiring children with ASD (Naigles & Fein, 2017). Thus, the results testify that universal underlying mechanisms are playing vital roles in grammatical acquisition of children with ASD across languages (e.g., the setting of word order parameters, the preservation of functional morphemes, the universal operation of WH-Movement), despite their pervasive social cognition impairments. These findings suggest that core grammatical knowledge may be preserved in children with ASD, even in the face of radical differences in language environment and social/communicative deficits, supporting the contribution of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition. The results shed light on the sharp contrast between linguistic competence (governed by the internal computational system of the language faculty) vs. linguistic performance (affected by loci of impairment in the sensory-motor and the conceptual-intentional interfaces) in ASD. Furthermore, the results highlight the dissociation between the lexical vs. the grammatical modules in ASD, supporting a modular view of the diverse language domains in the language faculty. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)