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The two experiments presented in this paper tested the effects of gender agreement on lexical decisions by presenting grammatically congruent and incongruent noun phrases in different context-target combinations. In the first experiment, a condition in which the target noun was directly preceded by a gender-marked determiner was contrasted with a condition in which an invariable adjective intervened between the determiner and the target. In the second experiment we compared the effects of gender marking in the latter condition with a condition in which both the determiner and the intervening adjective carried an overt gender mark. It was shown first, that lexical decision times to target nouns were longer for incongruent context-target combinations than for a congruent baseline condition. Second, the magnitude of the congruency effect was stronger when the target noun was preceded by a determiner plus an invariable adjective than by a determiner only. Third, the magnitude of the effect did not vary according to whether or not the intervening adjective carried a phonetically realized mark of gender. These results are discussed in terms of the automaticity of syntactic processes, and the crucial role of determiners in setting agreement features for the entire noun phrase when processing languages such as French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening times and Post-online measures of Chinese SRCs and ORCs are estimated and compared. The on-line results show that ORCs and SRCs demonstrate no differential processing patterns under the interfering conditions. At the relativizer-DE marker region, under 0-digt-load, SRCs show processing advantage, while under 5-digit-load condition, SRCs display greater listening times than ORCs. Furthermore, the Post-online RTs and accuracy of post-sentence comprehension and digit recalls show that processing of SRCs had worse performance. These results lead to the conjecture that there may be no intrinsic processing asymmetry in Chinese RCs, and underscore the necessity that future studies in exploring the processing metrics of sentence complexity should consider the working memory involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi. The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants' reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native German speakers' sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch paradigm, Experiment 1 investigated whether a fronted wh-phrase would be considered as a potential antecedent for a pronoun intervening between the wh-phrase and its canonical position. Both native and non-native readers initially attempted coreference in WCO but not in SCO configurations, as evidenced by early gender-mismatch effects in our WCO conditions. Experiment 2 was an offline antecedent judgement task whose results mirrored the SCO/WCO asymmetry observed in our reading-time data. Taken together, our results show that the SCO constraint immediately restricts pronoun interpretation in both native and non-native comprehension, and further suggest that SCO and WCO constraints derive from different sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, ) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, ; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, ; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, ), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external 'performance factors.' The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, ) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411-1423, , Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97-114, ) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain English constructions permit two syntactic alternations. This study investigates the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing difficulty. What cognitive mechanisms are responsible for our attraction to some alternations and our aversion to others? This article reviews three psycholinguistic models of the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing: Maximum Per Word Surprisal (building on the ideas of Hale, in Proceedings of the 2nd Meeting of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburgh, PA, pp 159-166, ), Uniform Information Density (UID) (Levy and Jaeger in Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 19:849-856, ; inter alia), and Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (Gildea and Temperley in Cognit Sci 34:286-310, ). Each theory makes predictions about which alternations native speakers should favor. Subjects were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked to judge which of two competing syntactic alternations sounded more natural. Logistic regression analysis on the resulting data suggests that both UID and DLM are powerful predictors of human preferences. We conclude that alternations that approach uniform information density and minimize dependency length are easier to process than those that do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We directly compare children learning argument expressing and argument dropping languages on the use of verb meaning and syntactic cues, by examining enactments of transitive and intransitive verbs given in transitive and intransitive syntactic frames. Our results show similarities in the children's knowledge: (1) Children were somewhat less likely to perform an action when the core meaning of a verb was in conflict with the frame in which it was presented; (2) Children enacted the core meaning of the verb with considerable accuracy in all conditions; and (3) Children altered their actions to include or not include explicit objects appropriately to the frame. The results suggest that 3-year-olds learning languages that present them with very different structural cues still show similar knowledge about and sensitivity to the core meanings of transitive and intransitive verbs as well as the implications of the frames in which they appear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated how people produce simple and complex phrases in speaking using a newly developed immediate recall task. People read and tried to memorize a target sentence, then read a prime sentence, then did a distractor task involving the prime sentence. Despite the delay and activity between memory and recall, people could still recall the target sentence although the syntactic form of the recalled sentence was influenced by the syntactic form of the prime sentence. This result replicates the syntactic priming effect found with other experimental paradigms. Using this task, we tested how people used abstract syntactic plans to produce simple and complex noun phrases. We found syntactic priming both when targets and prime sentences matched in complexity and when they did not match, suggesting that simple and complex noun phrases are built by the same syntactic routines during speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I briefly review 25 years of aphasia research directed to uncovering the neurological organization of sentence comprehension capacity. I provide a description of aphasic comprehension disorders offered along syntactic lines, and I connect the syntactic limitation (revealed in this description) to the disruption of cortically localizable processing resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the relationships among verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing in the speech of 21 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev.) (DSM-III-R) diagnosed schizophrenic participants and 19 DSM-III-R diagnosed manic participants. We found that less verbosity was associated with both less syntactic complexity and greater pausing. In addition, less syntactic complexity was associated with greater pausing. The strength of these associations did not differ significantly between the two diagnostic groups. We propose that deficits in verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing are all related to a disturbance in message generation. We discuss the consistency of this hypothesis with previous research linking information processing and frontal lobe deficits to disturbances in verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]