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Evidence from two experiments reveals that in Chamorro, a verb-first language, the comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) is sensitive to the order of the RC with respect to the head. Unlike most other languages, Chamorro allows both postnominal and prenominal RCs, so it is possible to compare how the two types are processed within the same language. Moreover, Chamorro is a small language whose speakers do not fit the typical profile of participants in cognitive science experiments. We found that RC comprehension is affected by the relative order of RC and head, and by other language-specific factors. However, we also found new support for a subject gap advantage in all RC types. This advantage emerged in early response measures and was reinforced in postnominal RCs, but often outcompeted in prenominal RCs by other pressures. We frame this competition in terms of a model in which grammatical licensing requirements play a key role in comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient effects (sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model. SOSP generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values by assuming a flexible structure-formation system in which the parses are formed even under sub-optimal circumstances by coercing elements to play roles that do not optimally suit them. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although many linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We describe the conceptual framework of SOSP, showing that it largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that block dependencies into elements that allow them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work on Relative Clause attachment has overlooked a crucial grammatical distinction across both the languages and structures tested: the selective availability of Pseudo Relatives. We reconsider the literature in light of this observation and argue that, all else being equal, local attachment is found with genuine Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment emerges when their surface identical imposters, Pseudo Relatives, are available. Hence, apparent cross-linguistic variation in parsing preferences is reducible to grammatical factors. The results from two novel experiments in Italian are presented in support of these conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of whether implicit prosody contributes to the parsing process, or whether it merely interprets the syntactic analysis. The present reading experiments examine the influence of stress-based linguistic rhythm on the resolution of local lexical-syntactic ambiguities in German. Both speech production data from unprepared oral reading and eye-tracking results from silent reading demonstrate that readers favor syntactic analyses that allow for a prosodic representation in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate rhythmically. The findings contribute evidence confirming immediate and guiding effects of linguistic rhythm on the earliest stages of syntactic parsing in reading. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error) are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error). Two major accounts of this phenomenon make different predictions about where, in the course of incremental processing of an object relative, difficulty should first appear. An account emphasizing memory processes () predicts difficulty at the relative clause verb, while an account emphasizing experience-based expectations () predicts earlier difficulty, at the relative clause subject. Two eye movement experiments tested these predictions. Regressive saccades were much more likely from the subject noun phrase of an object relative than from the same noun phrase occurring within a subject relative (Experiment 1) or within a verbal complement clause (Experiment 2). This effect was further amplified when the relative pronoun that was omitted. However, reading time was also inflated on the object relative clause verb in both experiments. These results suggest that the violation of expectations and the difficulty of memory retrieval both contribute to the difficulty of object relative clauses, but that these two sources of difficulty have qualitatively distinct behavioral consequences in normal reading. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal relative clauses. A self-paced reading task was used in Experiments 1 and 2, while ERPs were recorded in Experiment 3. We used relative clauses that were ambiguous between an object or subject-gap interpretation and disambiguated later in the sentence. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that SR took longer to read than OR in the critical disambiguating region. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that SR produced larger amplitudes than OR in the P600 window immediately after reading the critical disambiguating word. Our results suggest that SR are not universally easier to process. They cast doubts on universal hypotheses and suggest that processing complexity may depend on language-specific aspects of grammar. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners’ mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to real words. Both immediately after familiarization and post-one week, ALL outputs were lexicalized only when the cues available during familiarization (transitional probabilities and wordlikeness) suggested the same parsing (Experiments 1 and 3). No lexicalization effect occurred with incongruent cues (Experiments 2 and 4). Yet, ALL differed from chance, suggesting a dissociation between item knowledge and lexicalization. Similarly contrasted results were found when frequency of occurrence of the stimuli was equated during familiarization (Experiments 3 and 4). Our findings thus indicate that ALL outputs may be lexicalized as far as the segmentation cues are congruent, and that this process cannot be accounted for by raw frequency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

One of the core issues in psycholinguistic research concerns the relationship between word category information and verb–argument structure (e.g. transitivity) information of verbs in the process of sentence parsing. In two experiments (visual versus auditory presentation) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by presenting sentences in which the critical word simultaneously realized both a word category and a transitivity violation. ERPs for sentences with both types of violation clustered with the patterns for sentences with a word category violation only, but were different from the patterns elicited by argument structure violations in isolation, since only the latter elicited an N400 ERP component. The finding that an argument structure violation evoked an N400 only if the phrase structure of the respective sentence was correct suggests that a successful integration of the word category information of a verb functionally precedes the application of its argument structure information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]