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In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentence constituents in German, we show that the P600 is elicited when our language processing system has syntactic alternatives at a certain item given in the input string. That the P600 is sensitive to syntactic ambiguity adds crucial evidence to current debates in psycholinguistic modelling, as the results clearly favour parallel models of syntactic processing which assume that ambiguity is recognized and costly. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf's functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller's monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural morphology in English is associated with a multiplicity inference. For example, "Emily fed giraffes" is typically interpreted to mean that Emily fed multiple giraffes. It has long been observed that this inference disappears in downward-entailing linguistic environments, such as in the scope of negation. For example, "Emily didn't feed giraffes" does not merely suggest that she didn't feed multiple giraffes, but rather that she didn't feed any. There are three main approaches to explaining this puzzle: the first proposes that the plural is ambiguous, and invokes a preference for stronger meanings; the second derives multiplicity inferences as implicatures; and the third provides a homogeneity-based account. These different approaches can all account for the interpretation of the plural across upward- and downward-entailing environments. They differ, however, in what they predict for three further aspects of the plural: the status of positive and negative plural sentences in singular contexts, children's acquisition of plural meanings, and the relationship between plural meanings and scalar implicatures. In this paper, we report on three experiments investigating adults' and preschool-aged children's interpretation of plural morphology in English. The experiments reveal that participants distinguish positive and negative plural sentences presented in singular contexts, and that adults assign a different status to these positive and negative sentences. It is also observed that children, unlike adults, tend to accept underinformative positive plural sentences in singular contexts - in parallel with their behavior on standard scalar implicatures - while they are relatively more adult-like when it comes to negative plural sentences in the same contexts, showing a tendency to reject the negative sentences. We discuss how the findings of the three experiments are expected on a scalar implicature approach to multiplicity inferences, and the open challenges they pose for the ambiguity and homogeneity approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variable linguistic environments require the ability to quickly update expectations and behavior including speech comprehension. This adaptive capacity is key to understanding how listeners successfully recognize speaker intentions in light of the ubiquitous variability in speech. The present study investigates how listeners' real-time sentence comprehension adapts to speaker-specific prosodic variability. In two forced choice mouse tracking experiments, listeners had to identify a visual referent guided by pre-recorded instructions. When exposed to a speaker that uses unconventional pitch accent placement, listeners discard intonational information for that speaker, but keep using intonation to resolve the referential ambiguity for another speaker that places pitch accents conventionally. These results show for the first time that intonationally guided sentence comprehension adapts in a speaker-sensitive way. The study further provides valuable first insights into the temporal unfolding of this adaptation process. Listeners first attribute unconventional patterns to the context, thus discarding the informational value of intonation for both speakers. After sufficient evidence, however, listeners start attributing unexpected patterns to only the unconventional speaker. Materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: http://osf.io/fdpg4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]