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Abstract In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate [...]

Four experiments probed the interpretation of sentence-final as -clauses (e.g., Close the book as a librarian would/would do) ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a "propositional" interpretation. Experiment 1, an interpretation study, found a predominance of manner interpretations for sentences containing would and would do as the elliptical predicate inside the as -clause, biased by which form participants were initially exposed to. In Experiment 2, we assumed that a comma may be present before the as -clause for both interpretations, but that when the contrast between a comma and no comma is called to the reader's attention it will favor the propositional interpretation. The expectation was confirmed. In Experiment 3 a would -sentence was preceded by a How question or by a What's with question: propositional interpretations were rare but more prevalent following the What's with question than the manner question. Experiment 4 added a What did question and tested both no-comma would (NoComma) sentences and comma would do (CommaDo) sentences. CommaDo sentences received more propositional interpretations than NoComma sentences, and were read faster following the What's with question than the How question, whereas the NoComma were read faster after the How question. All four studies showed manner interpretations prevail, though would do, a (contrastive) comma or a non-manner question increase the frequency of propositional interpretations. Two possibilities are considered for what underlies the manner preference: a general preference for an adjunct to be part of the event description in cases of ambiguity, or the availability of a pre-existing event-"slot" for manner. The reading time results favor the former possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic [...]

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested coordinating (Narration) versus subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations in sentence-medial or sentence-final position. Coordinating relations received lower naturalness ratings in general but especially in medial position. We propose a timeline hypothesis that coordinating (Narration) relations in medial position are difficult because the processor constructs a narrative timeline from earlier to later times and avoids ordering an event later on the timeline than an event whose description has not yet been completed. An interpretation study of ambiguous appositives confirmed the timeline hypothesis (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the appositive event was disambiguated to either precede or follow the main clause event on the narrative timeline. Sentences with medial appositives disambiguated to precede the main clause event received higher naturalness ratings than those disambiguated to follow the main clause event, as expected on the timeline hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absract: A sentence like (i) can often be used interchangeably with (ii). I don't think it's raining. I think it's not raining. With particular matrix predicates (e.g., think, seem, be probable) the negation from a complement clause may appear in the matrix clause, according to syntactic accounts, owing to a rule of Neg Raising, or according to semantic accounts, owing to a cancelable presupposition of the Excluded Middle (I believe p or I believe ¬p). Six written acceptability judgment studies approached the phenomena of Neg Raising (NR) as anticipation. A speaker who intends a negation may produce the negation early when the matrix verb permits the negation to be raised, especially if the polarity of the complement clause is at issue. Experiments 1 and 2, with a strict negative polarity item (NPI), showed higher ratings for sentences with Neg Raising (+NR) than for sentences without (−NR), failing to support the complexity predictions of a syntactic account where +NR involves an extra rule or dependency. Experiment 3 compared +NR predicates with −NR predicates and showed a penalty for matrix negation in the latter. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that increasing the distance between the raised negation and the negated predicate reduced the +NR advantage, but they showed that this was only an effect of increased sentence length. Experiment 6 showed an increased advantage for Neg Raising in a response to a polar question about the truth of the complement sentence. The results do not support a syntactic account but rather some version of a semantic or pragmatic account of Neg Raising coupled with the assumption that speakers anticipate salient upcoming material, such as a negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/ repair and they are 'familiar', i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclusion of almost in A passerby rescued a child from almost being run over by a bus.), to a majority of unblended interpretations for doubled quantifier sentences (Many students often turn in their assignments late) to only a third undoubled implicit negation (I just like the way the president looks without his shirt off.) The repair or speech error reversal account offered here is contrasted with the noisy channel approach and the good enough processing approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time interpretation of pronouns is sometimes sensitive to the presence of grammatically-illicit antecedents and sometimes not. This occasional sensitivity has been taken as evidence that structural constraints do not immediately impact the initial antecedent retrieval for pronoun interpretation. We argue that it is important to separate effects that reflect the initial antecedent retrieval process from those that reflect later processes. We present results from five reading comprehension experiments. Both the current results and previous evidence support the hypothesis that agreement features and structural constraints immediately constrain the antecedent retrieval process for pronoun interpretation. Occasional sensitivity to grammatically-illicit antecedents may be due to repair processes triggered when the initial retrieval fails to return a grammatical antecedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Productivity--the hallmark of linguistic competence--is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown. To address this question, here we gauge the generalization afforded by American Sign Language (ASL). As a case study, we examine reduplication (X→XX)--a rule that, inter alia, generates ASL nouns from verbs. If signers encode this rule, then they should freely extend it to novel syllables, including ones with features that are unattested in ASL. And since reduplicated disyllables are preferred in ASL, such a rule should favor novel reduplicated signs. Novel reduplicated signs should thus be preferred to nonreduplicative controls (in rating), and consequently, such stimuli should also be harder to classify as nonsigns (in the lexical decision task). The results of four experiments support this prediction. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge of signers includes powerful algebraic rules. The convergence between these conclusions and previous evidence for phonological rules in spoken language suggests that the architecture of the phonological mind is partly amodal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' contents are processed semi-independently. In a written rating study comparing restrictive relative clauses and parentheticals in interrogatives and declaratives, we observe a significantly larger length penalty for restrictive relative clauses than for parentheticals. This difference cannot be attributed to differences in how listeners allocate attention across a sentence; a second study confirms that readers are equally sensitive to agreement violations in at-issue and not-at-issue contents. A third rating experiment shows that the results do not depend on the restrictive relative clause intervening on the subject-verb dependency. A final experiment shows that the observed effects obtain with definite determiners and demonstratives alike. Taken jointly, the results suggest that the parenthetical structures are processed independently of their embedding utterance, which in turn suggests that syntactic memory may be more differentiated than is typically assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two partially independent issues are addressed in two auditory rating studies: under what circumstances is a substring of a sentence identified as a stand-alone sentence, and under what circumstances do globally ill-formed but 'locally coherent' analyses emerge? A new type of locally coherent structure is established in Experiment 1, where a that-less complement clause is at least temporarily analysed as a stand-alone sentence when it corresponds to a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, reduced relative-clause structures like those in studies by Tabor and colleagues were investigated. As in Experiment 1, the root sentence (mis-)analyses emerged most frequently when the locally coherent clause corresponded to a prosodic phrase. However, a substantial number of locally coherent analyses emerged even without prosodic help, especially in examples with for-datives (which do not grammatically permit a reduced relative-clause structure for some speakers). Overall, the results suggest that prosodic grouping of constituents encourages analysis of a sub-string as a root sentence, and raise the question of whether all local coherence structures involve analysis of an utterance-final sub-string as a root sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 4 experiments, we used self-paced reading and eye tracking to demonstrate that readers are, under some conditions, sensitive to the presuppositions of definite versus indefinite determiner phrases (DPs). Reading was faster when the context stereotypically provided a single possible referent for a definite DP or multiple possible referents for an indefinite DP than when context and DP definiteness were mismatched. This finding goes beyond previous evidence that definite DPs are processed more rapidly than are indefinite DPs when there is a unique or familiar referent in the context, showing that readers are sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of (in)definiteness. However, the finding was obtained only when readers had to perform a simple arithmetic task between reading a sentence and seeing a question about it. The intervening task may have encouraged them to process the sentence more deeply in order to form a representation that would persist while doing the arithmetic. The methodological implications of this observation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing a prosodic boundary before a phrase may influence its syntactic analysis. However, the boundary's effect depends on the presence, size, and position of other, earlier, prosodic boundaries. In three experiments, we extend previous results about the effect of the position of the early boundary. In sentences in which a final phrase may modified either a local verb or an earlier verb, a boundary immediately after the first verb leads to more first-verb attachments than when the earlier boundary appears in another position between the two verbs (Experiments 1 and 2). This effect cannot be attributed to weaker effects of more distant boundaries (Experiment 2), but is likely due to the first verb being more prominent when a boundary immediately follows it, since similar effects are observed when the verb is accented (Experiment 3). The results support the informative boundary hypothesis and show that the impact of earlier, nonlocal boundaries is not fully uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are sometimes read faster than disambiguated strings. Models of parsing have explained this tendency by appealing either to a race in the construction of alternative structures or to reanalysis. However, it is also possible that readers of ambiguous sentences save time by strategically underspecifying interpretations of ambiguous attachments. In a self-paced reading study, participants viewed sentences with relative clauses that could attach to one of two sites. Type of question was also manipulated between participants in order to test whether goals can influence reading/parsing strategies. The experiment revealed an ambiguity advantage in reading times, but only when participants expected superficial comprehension questions. When participants expected queries about relative clause interpretation, disambiguating regions were inspected with more care, and the ambiguity advantage was attenuated. However, even when participants expected relative clause queries, question-answering times suggested underspecified representations of ambiguous relative clause attachments. The results support the construal and "good-enough" models of parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it. The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when). Further, in a small pilot study directly comparing a sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases that may induce a stress clash (I'd like to know who hid it where when) with a sentence violating Superiority but avoiding the final adjacent wh-phrases (I'd like to know where who hid it when), half the participants indicated that the Superiority violation sentence sounded better. This suggests that the status of some additional-wh sentences may appear to improve simply because the comparison sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases is degraded. Overall, the results of the studies suggest that there is no need to complicate syntactic theory to account for the additional-wh effect, because there is no general additional-wh effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VP-ellipsis and sluicing are forms of ellipsis that can cross a sentence boundary. We present a series of comprehension studies on these forms of ellipsis to elucidate their processing and the relation of syntactic and discourse processing. One set of studies examines the hypothesis that the representation of elided material is syntactically structured. We present evidence supporting the hypothesis and tentatively attribute the effects to sharing of the structure of the antecedent constituent, with structure building or substitution of a variable for a constituent permitted if it is licensed by the syntactic principles of the language. Another set of studies tests the hypothesis that a new utterance is preferentially related to the main assertion of the preceding utterance, which is typically a constituent high in the syntactic tree. The results suggest that discourse processing differs from syntactic processing, where the most accessible material is recent material found low in the syntactic tree. A final set of studies examines the interplay of the syntactic processor, which may not violate ‘‘islands,’’ and the discourse processor, which may, in the processing of ellipsis sentences involving islands. A novel explanation is offered for the observation (Ross 1967) that sluicing out of relative-clause islands is grammatical except when sprouting is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a glimpse of the moment-by-moment processes used by highly skilled and average readers during silent reading. The eye movements of adult readers were monitored while they silently read sentences. Fixation durations and the spatial–temporal patterns of eye movements were examined to see whether the two groups of readers exhibited differential effects of frequency and/or predictability. In Experiment 1, high- and low-frequency target words were embedded in nonconstraining sentence contexts. In Experiment 2, the same participants read high- and low-frequency target words that were either predictable or unpredictable, embedded in highly constraining sentence contexts. Results indicated that when target words appeared in highly constraining sentence contexts, the average readers showed different effects of frequency and predictability from those shown in the highly skilled readers. It appears that reading skill can interact with predictability to affect the word recognition processes used during silent reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been noted for some time that given information tenth to be placed before new information (e.g., Clark & Clark, 1977). To determine whether this holds generally, double-object and NP-PP sentences like the following were tested in two speeded acceptability judgment experiments. (1A) The senator mailed the woman a report. (1B) The senator mailed a woman the report. (1C) The senator mailed the report to a woman. (1D) The senator mailed a report to the woman. Given-before-new (or definite before indefinite) ordering facilitated processing for double-object structures, with (1A) processed faster and accepted more often than (1B), but did not facilitate processing of (1C) relative to (1D) in NP-PP structures. A third self-paced reading experiment showed that the advantage of the definite-before-indefinite new ordering holds for constructions with a shifted NP (The senator mailed to the woman a report) but also showed that facilitation from having a definite NP immediately after the verb was limited to cases where the two arguments of a verb contrast in definiteness. The results suggest that the presumed given-before-new preference is not general, but is instead limited to certain constructions and is based on the language comprehension system being sensitive to the requirements of language production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four naturalness judgment experiments were conducted to test different hypotheses about prosodic phrasing. The hypothesis that syntactic constituents should not be broken into distinct prosodic phrases [as in Truckenbrodt''s Wrap constraint (Truckenbrodt, H., 1995. Phonological Phrases: Their Relation to Syntax, Focus, and Prominence. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, MIT)] was less predictive of the results of Experiments 1 and 2 than the hypothesis that constituents may be freely divided into prosodic phrases, as long as the resulting phrases are semantically coherent [Selkirk, E., 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between Sound and Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA]. The results of two further experiments confirmed Watson and Gibson''s (Watson, D. G., Gibson, E., 2001. Linguistic structure and intonational phrasing. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, 15–17 March 2001) claim that prosodic breaks are natural before long upcoming constituents, but did not support their hypothesis that the distance between a new item and its integration site is what motivates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary. The results are interpreted as further evidence that the use of high level breaks in language comprehension is not governed by an invariant local mapping from syntax or processing considerations to prosody/intonation, but is related to the overall pattern of intonational choices made. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Two eye-movement experiments examined the processing of sentences containing reduced relative constructions. In the first experiment, animacy of the sentential subject, structural ambiguity, and parafoveal preview of syntactically disambiguating material were manipulated. Evidence of disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences, regardless of animacy or preview. In the second experiment, readers with high versus low verbal working memory capacity read the sentences from Experiment 1. High and low-span readers exhibited very similar patterns of processing. As in the first experiment, evidence for disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences whether the sentential subject was animate or inanimate. Sentences with animate subjects were hard to interpret, and relatively late measures of processing indicated that an animate subject made ambiguity especially hard to overcome. We interpret the findings as being consistent with serial, depth-first models of parsing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the use of reanalysis strategies and eye movements in reading garden path sentences. Characteristics of the sentence; Patterns of eye movement; Type of overt reanalysis strategy.

Focuses on the resolution of the antecedent of a plural pronoun. Preference of readers on ontologically homogeneous than that of ontologically heterogeneous; Role of nonsymmetric verb; Theory of plural pronoun comprehension.

Explores the processing of ambiguous sentences. Adjunct attachments of prosodic boundaries; Comparison of attachment between clausal and nonclausal adjuncts; Importance of acoustic magnitude of local boundary and distant boundary.

Reviews related research on the roles of linguistic structure on sentence and text comprehension. Rise and fall of structural analysis; Argument structure, frequency and plausibility effects in lexical structure; Effects of context on sentence processing; Memory and knowledge in discourse comprehension; Memory limitation and frequency effects.

Studies the role of salience in conceptual combination involving simple feature salience, ontological category and assessed similarity. Definition of a series of novel noun-noun combinations in which the feature salience of N1 and N2 was manipulated; Evidence that highly salient features drove property-mapping interpretations based on the combinations.

The article presents information on four experiments designed to investigate whether pitch accents are used by listeners to disambiguate otherwise ambiguous syntactic strings. It informs that experiments one through four contrast embedded question and relative clause analysis. Experiment five contrasts an embedded question and a temporal adjunct analysis. It is stated that the final pitch accents is not necessarily the most prominent accent in the phrase. Pitch accent is not the only factor that can affect listeners' interpretations of sentences that are ambiguous between question and other interpretations. It is stated that prosodic phrasing can play a role in disambiguating English interrogative and relative pronouns.

Investigates the eye movements of Spanish and English readers while reading comparable sentences. Significant reading time advantage in Spanish when the reader is forced to modify the first noun phrase; Preference of Spanish readers for interpreting relative clauses.

Examines how the printed frequency of two adjacent words influenced the benefit of having parafoveal preview of the second word. Extension of the studies by A.W. Inhoff and K. Rayner and J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira; Influence of working memory capacity; Determination of preview parafoveal benefit; Group distribution of fixation duration.

Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. Focus and other aspects of information structure can be marked in various ways. In English, as in many other languages, a very important way is via intonation. A pitch accent is often used to signal focus.

This article cites a study that examines the relative clause interpretation preferences in Spanish and English language. Five experiments measured reading time for Spanish and English sentences containing a complex noun phrase (NP) followed by a relative clause. Spanish sentences were read more rapidly when the content of the relative clause forced it to modify the first of the two NP in the complex NP than when it modified the second NP. Their English translations showed no difference in reading time. This preference to take the first noun as a host for the relative clause in Spanish occurred whether the relative clause was disambiguated by morphological gender marking or by its content.

Presents two eyetracking experiments examining the reading of sentences. Reference to L. Stowe's paper on linguistic structure in language processing; Finding of results reported by Stowe on the present experiments; Disambiguating region of a sentence; Initial syntactic analysis; Revision of initial misanalysis.