Search

Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the "clause chain," in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require "switch-reference" suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers' gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A model of structural priming based on Tree-Adjoining Grammar is developed. • The lexical boost effect for that-priming occurred. • But only when prime and target both contained filler-gap dependencies. • Or when neither did, confirming the prediction of the model. • Speakers use distinct prcesses for cross-clausal filler-gap dependencies. A previous model of long-distance dependency production claims that speakers use two distinct pieces of structures containing clause-taking verbs like believe and the complementizer that or the null complementizer when planning sentences with cross-clausal filler-gap dependencies (e.g., Who did the breeder believe (that) the dog bit?) vs. when planning sentences without (e.g., The breeder believed (that) the dog bit them.). Under a certain assumption about the lexical boost effect, this model predicts that the lexical boost effect for that -priming occurs only when prime and target sentences both contain a cross-clausal filler-gap dependency or when neither does. In the current study, a computational model of structural priming implementing the core claims of the previous filler-gap dependency production model was built to show that this prediction coherently follows from the model. The prediction of the model was then tested in five recall-based structural priming experiments. Speakers showed a larger complementizer priming effect when prime and target sentences share a clause-taking verb (i.e., the lexical boost effect). But the lexical boost effect was selective to when both prime and target sentences contained cross-clausal filler-gap dependencies (Experiment 3) and when neither did (Experiment 1). Critically, the lexical boost effect was absent when only either prime or target sentences contained filler-gap dependencies crossing the complementizer structure (Experiments 2, 4, and 5), confirming the prediction of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Speakers reliably repeat structures they heard used to describe particular pictures. • This reflects durable associations between event content and syntactic structure. • This process could reflect how we learn the meanings conveyed by syntactic structure. Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content – such as these emergent properties of events. Experiment 1 provides evidence that speakers form associations between syntactic structures and particular event depictions. Experiment 2 shows that these associations also hold for different depictions of the same events. Experiments 3 and 4 implicate representations of the semantic features of events in these associations. Taken together, these results reveal an effect we term syntactic entrainment that is well positioned to reflect the recalibration of the strength of the mappings or associations that allow syntactic structures to convey emergent properties of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]