Showing papers in "Journal of Psycholinguistic Research in 1999"

Subject-object ambiguities in german embedded clauses : an across-the-board comparison

Abstract: This paper examines the processing of embedded clauses in German which are ambiguous between a subject-before-object and an object-before-subject order. In an experiment using a speeded grammaticality judgment task, four types of locally ambiguous clauses were compared: (i) sentences involving movement of a definite noun phrase (NP), (ii) sentences involving pronoun movement, (iii) relative clauses, and (iv) embedded questions. We found that readers were consistently garden-pathed in the object-before-subject condition, regardless of sentence type. Furthermore, there were considerable differences with respect to garden-path strength. The garden-path effect was strongest for sentences involving scrambling. In addition, sentences involving pronoun movement induced more processing difficulty than embedded questions and relative clauses. We argue that our findings can be best explained within a serial processing model that acknowledges both syntactic and nonsyntactic influences on reanalysis and that can account for graded effects of garden-path strength.

Emotion in speech: the acoustic attributes of fear, anger, sadness, and joy.

Abstract: Decoders can detect emotion in voice with much greater accuracy than can be achieved by objective acoustic analysis. Studies that have established this advantage, however, used methods that may have favored decoders and disadvantaged acoustic analysis. In this study, we applied several methodologic modifications for the analysis of the acoustic differentiation of fear, anger, sadness, and joy. Thirty-one female subjects between the ages of 18 and 35 (encoders) were audio-recorded during an emotion-induction procedure and produced a total of 620 emotion-laden sentences. Twelve female judges (decoders), three for each of the four emotions, were assigned to rate the intensity of one emotion each. Their combined ratings were used to select 38 prototype samples per emotion. Past acoustic findings were replicated, and increased acoustic differentiation among the emotions was achieved. Multiple regression analysis suggested that some, although not all, of the acoustic variables were associated with decoders' ratings. Signal detection analysis gave some insight into this disparity. However, the analysis of the classic constellation of acoustic variables may not completely capture the acoustic features that influence decoders' ratings. Future analyses would likely benefit from the parallel assessment of respiration, phonation, and articulation.

Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at the syntax-semantics interface.

Abstract: This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion--in addition to syntactic composition--is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically transparent counterpart, a string that provides for an interpretable representation via syntactic composition alone. The prediction of a higher computational cost for this process is borne out by the results.

Gender Electrified: ERP Evidence on the Syntactic Nature of Gender Processing

Abstract: The central issue of this study concerns the claim that the processing of gender agreement in online sentence comprehension is a syntactic rather than a conceptual/semantic process. This claim was tested for the grammatical gender agreement in Dutch between the definite article and the noun. Subjects read sentences in which the definite article and the noun had the same gender and sentences in which the gender agreement was violated. While subjects read these sentences, their electrophysiological activity was recorded via electrodes placed on the scalp. Earlier research has shown that semantic and syntactic processing events manifest themselves in different event-related brain potential (ERP) effects. Semantic integration modulates the amplitude of the so-called N400. The P600/SPS is an ERP effect that is more sensitive to syntactic processes. The violation of grammatical gender agreement was found to result in a P600/SPS. For violations in sentence-final position, an additional increase of the N400 amplitude was observed. This N400 effect is interpreted as resulting from the consequence of a syntactic violation for the sentence-final wrap-up. The overall pattern of results supports the claim that the on-line processing of gender agreement information is not a content driven but a syntactic-form driven process.

Incidental foreign-language acquisition by children watching subtitled television programs.

Abstract: Previous research on adults has demonstrated incidental foreign-language acquisition by watching subtitled television programs in a foreign language. Based on these findings and the literature about the sensitive period for language acquisition, we expected the acquisition to be larger with children. A short subtitled cartoon was presented to Dutch-speaking children (8–12 years old). We varied the channel in which the foreign and native languages were presented (sound track and subtitles); we also looked at the effects of the existing knowledge of the foreign language (due to formal teaching at school) and the linguistic similarity between the native and the foreign language (using Danish and French as foreign languages). We obtained real but limited foreign-language acquisition and in contrast to the sensitive language-acquisition hypothesis, the learning of the children was not superior to that of adults investigated in prior studies. The acquisition here does not profit from the more formal language learning at school. Contrary to the adults, the children tend to acquire more when the foreign language is in the sound track than in the subtitles.

Processing grammatical gender during language comprehension

Abstract: The paper reviews empirical evidence on the processing of grammatical gender during language comprehension, mainly focusing on gender priming. Evidence comes from behavioral experiments investigating gender priming and from behavioral as well as neurophysiological experiments evaluating the interaction of gender priming with semantic information. While the behavioral data do not provide a completely unambiguous picture, the neurophysiological data and the most reliable behavioral effects are more in line with a modular than with an interactive view of lexical access.

Representation and Processing of Grammatical Gender in Language Production: A Review

Abstract: The article reviews recent empirical evidence on the representation and processing of grammatical gender in language production. The evidence comes from experimental studies on error-free production, studies on the tip-of-the tongue phenomenon, and studies on naturally occurring or experimentally elicited speech errors. Relating these studies to current models of language production does not yield one completely consistent picture. However, the emerging picture puts some important constraints on models of language production.

The interplay of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity in lexical processing : evidence from a morphologically rich language

Abstract: This study addresses the role of three factors in morphological processing of visually presented words in Finnish: word formation type (inflection versus derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Three visual lexical decision experiments show that complex words can be processed slower, equally fast, or even faster than comparable monomorphemic word forms. We will argue that this diverse pattern of results reflects the ways different complex words are stored and processed. Moreover, it indicates that the balance of storage and computation crucially depends on the interplay of the three above-mentioned factors. Surprisingly, our results converge in a manner consistent with data obtained from a typologically very different language, namely Dutch.

The Effect of Arabic Vowels on the Reading Comprehension of Second- and Sixth-Grade Native Arab Children

Abstract: This study investigated the effect of Arabic vowels on the reading comprehension of native Arabic speakers This issue has not been addressed yet Two groups of native Arabic speakers were randomly sampled, one from two elementary schools in the Haifa area, and the other from two elementary schools in Nazareth Both groups in both experiments read Arabic texts in two reading conditions, vowelized and unvowelized; the older group (n = 74) answered 10 multiple-choice comprehension questions about each story, and the younger group (n = 71) answered seven multiple-choice comprehension questions The results revealed that vowels were a significant facilitator of reading comprehension in both age groups Considering these results, reading in Arabic orthography is not an autonomous word recognition process An alternative approach is suggested for reading Arabic

Grammatical Gender Systems: A Linguist's Assessment

Abstract: The notion of grammatical gender is defined and criteria for assigning nouns to genders are discussed, in particular semantic and formal criteria Data from child language acquisition show that both semantic and formal criteria can be the basis of children's overgeneralizations, although the question of to what extent more opaque semantic or formal gender assignment criteria are available to children remains to be ascertained

Why you can't kick the bucket as you slowly die : verbs in idiom comprehension

Abstract: Idiomatic phrases differ in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms are highly decomposable with their parts independently contributing to their overall figurative meaning (e.g. pop the question) while other idioms are nondecomposable with parts that do not contribute to their idiomatic meaning (e.g. kick the bucket). Nonetheless, even the parts of nondecomposable idioms might have a role in determining what they specifically mean. For example, the verb kick, in kick the bucket implies a quickness or suddenness to the death such that kick the bucket means “to die suddenly” rather than “to die slowly.” We report the findings of three experiments showing, in different ways, how the action of the verb contributes to the overall figurative meaning for some nondecomposable idioms. Together, these studies suggest that even nondecomposable idioms are not truly frozen as, at least, part of their overall figurative meanings are shaped by the particular verbs used in these phrases.

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions: Evidence from German Scrambling

Abstract: In Chomsky's theory of grammar, syntactic representations are said to contain movement traces, i.e., syntactically active but phonetically null copies of displaced constituents. Correspondingly, traces have been claimed to form part of the processing of sentence structure by showing that at trace sites the parser reactivates a moved constituent. This view has been contested, however, by researchers arguing that experimental findings can better be explained in terms of direct associations between subcategorizers and arguments. Against this background, we investigate antecedent reactivation effects in scrambled double-object constructions of German in two cross-modal priming experiments. We found significant priming effects at positions at which a movement analysis of these constructions would postulate an empty category, thus suggesting that the antecedent is indeed reactivated at the gap position. The Direct Association Hypothesis, on the other hand, cannot account for the priming effects we found. Implications for processing and for syntactic analyses of scrambling in German will be discussed.

Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system: experimental evidence from Russian.

Abstract: Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective–noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and phonologically transparent masculine or feminine nouns. Experiment 2 examines priming for transparent nouns against a neutral baseline (possible only for feminines and neuters), revealing that priming is due primarily to inhibition from discordant gender. Experiment 3 demonstrates gender priming with phonologically opaque masculine and feminine nouns. Experiment 4 returns to transparent masculine and feminine nouns with a different kind of baseline, using three versions of a single word root (prost—simple, in the feminine adjectival form prostaja, masculine adjectival form prostoj, and the adverbial form prosto ), and shows that gender can also facilitate lexical access, at least for feminine nouns. We conclude that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues “on-line,” helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.

Syntactic accuracy in sentence production: the case of gender disagreement in Italian language-impaired and unimpaired speakers

Abstract: We report three experiments with language-impaired and unimpaired speakers of Italian, assessing: (1) whether nonsyntactic (both conceptual and morphophonological) information is used in encoding the syntactic structure of a sentence; and (2) whether the integration of syntactic and non-syntactic information can be differentially impaired in Broca's aphasics. In all the experiments, gender agreement errors between a noun, subject of the sentence, and a predicative adjective were induced by presenting participants with sentence fragments to complete. The first experiment assessed the role of conceptual information. The second experiment investigated whether agreement is disrupted by the presence of another noun with different gender in the subject noun phrase. In the last experiment, we assessed whether morphophonological cues are used. We found that both populations used nonsyntactic information (both conceptual and morphophonological). However, patients were disrupted to a greater extent than normals by the presence of a gender mismatching noun in the subject noun phrase. The results are discussed in terms of how information integration during production is achieved and how it can be disrupted in aphasia.

The processing of grammatical gender and number in spanish

Abstract: The aim of the present study is to explore the representation and processing of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Experiment 1 compared the access time for words from the same base morpheme contrasted by the surface frequency of the masculine and feminine form, i.e., masculine-dominant items and feminine-dominant items. The results showed a surface frequency effect in both types of items. Experiment 2 compared the access time for masculine words having the same surface frequency but differing in their summed frequency (masculine plus feminine forms), the results showing no significant effect of this parameter. Finally, experiment 3 compared the access time for words from the same stem and contrasting by the surface frequencies for the singular and plural forms, i.e., singular-dominant and plural-dominant words. A clear frequency effect was observed for the singular-dominant words but not for plural-dominant ones. These results suggest that gender information is stored in the corresponding lexical entry and accessed from the full word form whereas the information about number is accessed from the stem corresponding to the singular form.

Building Syntactic Structure in Speaking

Abstract: 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.

When does gender constrain parsing? Evidence from ERPs

Abstract: We review the implications of recent ERP evidence for when and how grammatical gender agreement constrains sentence parsing. In some theories of parsing, gender is assumed to immediately and categorically block gender-incongruent phrase structure alternatives from being pursued. In other theories, the parser initially ignores gender altogether. The ERP evidence we discuss suggests an intermediate position, in which grammatical gender does not immediately block gender-incongruent phrase structures from being considered, but is used to dispose of them shortly thereafter.

Transcription and the Issue of Standardization

Abstract: For millenia, the human family has relied on transcription of spoken discourse into permanent written records as an indispensable tool of culture, history, and science. Currently, various transcription systems are used by linguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, and ethnographers to encode verbal, prosodic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic features of spoken discourse for scientific analysis. The recent history of such systems, some problems involved in their scientific application, and arguments against the mandatory standardization of such systems are presented. Guidelines for the construction and use of transcription systems are formulated.

Metalinguistic awareness in children: a developmental progression.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine if a developmental order exists in the metalinguistic ability of children to make judgments about the form of language while simultaneously attending to a meaningful linguistic context. The stimulus material consisted of a short story into which 20 nonsense lexical items had been substituted. The 20 stimuli were comprised of phonotactically illegal and legal sequences of phonemes. In addition, the lexical items had been positioned to replace either structure or content words within the story. The participants were 90 Caucasian children who were divided into nine age groupings from 4;0 to 12;11. Baseline data were obtained from 10 adults. All subjects were required to respond to the audio-recorded stimuli by pressing a button whenever a nonsense item was perceived. The data were analyzed for both number of correct responses and reaction times. Results revealed a major shift in metalanguage ability occurring between 7 and 8 years of age. The 8- to 12-year-olds responded correctly to more items and at significantly faster rates than the 4- to 7-year-olds. The adults outperformed the children on all tasks, showing that metalanguage development continues beyond childhood.

Differences Between the Morphology of Gender and Number: Evidence from Establishing Coreferences

Abstract: This work investigates the processing of gender and number features in the selection of a pronoun antecedent in Italian. In Italian there are instances of nouns in which gender and number are treated morphologically on a par, i.e., overtly and regularly marked by a suffix. In these cases, are the two features also treated similarly in processing? The experiments used sentences with two possible antecedents (differing in gender or number) in the main clause and a pronoun in the complement clause. The sentences were visually presented, with a unimodal lexical decision task at the end of the sentence. The results showed a selective reactivation of the antecedent matching the pronoun in either gender or number. The results are discussed in relation to previous Italian experiments, which found that in sentence internal position there is selective reactivation of only the number-matching antecedent. They are taken to support a model of the coreference processor in which gender and number features are used at different processing stages, due to their different syntactic representation.

Identifying the null subject: evidence from event-related brain potentials.

Abstract: Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during spoken language comprehension to study the on-line effects of gender agreement violations in controlled infinitival complements. Spanish sentences were constructed in which the complement clause contained a predicate adjective marked for syntactic gender. By manipulating the gender of the antecedent (i.e., the controller) of the implicit subject while holding constant the gender of the adjective, pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were created. The detection of such a gender agreement violation would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and its antecedent. The results showed a complex biphasic ERP (i.e., an early negativity with prominence at anterior and central sites, followed by a centroparietal positivity) in the violating condition as compared to the non-violating conditions. The brain reacts to NP-adjective gender agreement violations within a few hundred milliseconds of their occurrence. The data imply that the parser has properly coindexed the null subject of an infinitive clause with its antecedent.

Proverb comprehension : the primacy of literal meaning

Abstract: According to the multistage model of figurative language understanding, literal meanings must be developed before figurative meanings Although the model implies that figurative understanding should take longer than literal understanding, Kemper (1981) reported that figuratively biased proverbs were processed more quickly than literalized proverbs By contrast, in the present study the results from six experiments yielded the opposite conclusion These results support the multistage model and the conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension (Honeck, 1997; Honeck & Temple, 1994; Honeck, Voegtle, Dorfmueller, & Hoffman, 1980) which incorporates it Discrepancies between studies that have examined the multistage model may crucially depend on methodological factors such as type of experimental design, materials, and, as apparent in the present case, the task and dependent measure used

The Use of Lexical Prosody for Lexical Access of the Japanese Language

Abstract: It has been suggested that English listeners do not use lexical prosody for lexical access in word recognition. The present study was designed to examine whether this argument could be generalized to the Japanese language. Two experiments using a cross-modal priming task were conducted. The participants made a lexical decision regarding a visual target following an auditory prime that was either the prosodically congruent or incongruent homophone of the target. In experiment 1, the primes were presented as complete words, and in experiment 2, they were presented as word fragments. In both experiments, the priming effects were observed only in the congruent condition. These results suggest that the prime activated only the representations of prosodically congruent words. We therefore concluded that Japanese listeners use lexical prosody for lexical access of their language and that the role of lexical prosody is determined language-specifically.

Phoneme awareness in children: a function of sonority.

Abstract: This study tested the hypothesis that the sonority of phonemes (a sound's relative loudness compared to other sounds with the same length, stress, and pitch) influences children's segmentation of syllable constituents. Two groups of children, first graders and preschoolers, were assessed for their awareness of phonemes in coda and onset positions, respectively, using different phoneme segmentation tasks. Although the trends for the first graders were more robust than the trends for the preschoolers, phoneme segmentation in the two groups correlated with the sonority levels of phonemes, regardless of phoneme position or task. These results, consistent with prior studies of adults, suggest that perceptual properties, such as sonority levels, greatly influence the development of phoneme awareness.

Gender Processing in Speech Production: Evidence from German Speech Errors

Abstract: The present study investigates the relationship between gender processing and the properties of speech errors. Studying German noun substitution errors it was found that intended and intruded nouns were more often of the same grammatical gender than one would expect by chance (“identical gender effect”). In the present study, German slips of the tongue were investigated on the assumption that the occurrence of the identical gender effect depends on the processing level, where the error arises. The syntactic context preceding errors of nonidentical gender was also explored. In the German language, interactions of nonidentical gender nouns often result in agreement violations. It can be shown that gender congruency between nouns and preceding articles also depends on the processing level at which the noun error occurs. The results are consistent with two-stage models of lexical retrieval and speech production, according to which the syntactic information of a noun is only represented during the first stage of lexical access.

Effects of grammatical gender on picture and word naming: evidence from German.

Abstract: The present study investigated the effects of prior grammatical gender information (masculine, feminine, and neuter) provided by a minimal sentence context on both picture- and word-naming latencies. Named targets were nouns or pictures of concepts featuring unambiguous grammatical gender. Simple sentence fragments were presented auditorily prior to each picture or word target; the relation between these sentence primes and the word or picture target was either gender-congruent, gender-incongruent, or gender-neutral. Relative to the gender-neutral baseline, reliable facilitation and inhibition effects were both observed in the picture-naming task. By contrast, only inhibition effects were observed in the word-naming task. The results suggest that the processes of picture and word naming differ qualitatively when gender information is precued. The findings are discussed with respect to the distinction between postlexical and intralexical loci of the effects of gender context on word recognition and production.

The time course of grammatical and phonological processing during speaking: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Abstract: Motor-related brain potentials were used to examine the time course of grammatical and phonological processes during noun phrase production in Dutch. In the experiments, participants named colored pictures using a no-determiner noun phrase. On half of the trials a syntactic-phonological classification task had to be performed before naming. Depending on the outcome of the classifications, a left or a right push-button response was given (go trials), or no push-button response was given (no-go trials). Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were derived to test whether syntactic and phonological information affected the motor system at separate moments in time. The results showed that when syntactic information determined the response-hand decision, an LRP developed on no-go trials. However, no such effect was observed when phonological information determined response hand. On the basis of the data, it can be estimated that an additional period of at least 40 ms is needed to retrieve a word's initial phoneme once its lemma has been retrieved. These results provide evidence for the view that during speaking, grammatical processing precedes phonological processing in time.

The role of sentence context in accessing partial knowledge of word meanings.

Abstract: Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of the semantic domain activated by a sentence context when inferring the meaning of a partially known word. We investigated words at three levels of knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown (e.g., Durso & Shore, 1991). Experiment I demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the meanings of words that they deny are part of the language (the unknown level), and that they make use of relative differences in the size of the semantic domains tapped by two sentences when asked to decide on correct usage of these unknown words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the general semantic constraints operating on their unknown words, even when relative differences in size of semantic domains are controlled. Implications for the role of contextual constraints in vocabulary acquisition are discussed.

Effect of grammatical gender and semantic context on lexical access in Italian.

Abstract: The interacting effects of sentence context and grammatical gender on lexical access were investigated in Italian using a timed picture-naming paradigm. Results snowed large interacting effects of both sentence context and the gender of the article, with facilitation relative to two different control conditions. Repeat testing yielded an overall decrease in RT, but did not change the pattern of results. Results are interpreted in support of interactive activation models in which different sources of information are combined “on-line” to predict, anticipate or preactivate lexical targets.

Semantic Influence on Processing Gender Agreement: Evidence from Hebrew

Abstract: In the present study we examined the influence of manipulating the animacy of the sentential subject on the size of the syntactic priming effect induced by violation of subject-predicate gender agreement in Hebrew. The agreement violation delayed naming incongruent compared with congruent predicates. This priming effect was stronger when the sentential subject was an animate than an inanimate noun. Additional experiments revealed that: (1) the interaction between the priming effect and animacy of the subject could not be explained on the basis of differences in the phonological transparency of the gender inflection in the two groups of nouns, and (2) it was sensitive to the ratio of animate/inanimate conditions in a block. We suggest that the interaction between the processing of agreement and the effect of animacy is influenced by a controlled process of verifying the coherence of a currently identified word within a built-up context.