A memory-based explanation of antecedent-ellipsis mismatches: New insights from computational modeling

Abstract

An active question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the parser and grammar reflect distinct cognitive systems. Recent evidence for a distinct-systems view comes from cases of ungrammatical but acceptable antecedent-ellipsis mismatches (e.g., *Tom kicked Bill, and Matt was kicked by Tom too.). The finding that these mismatches show varying degrees of acceptability has been presented as evidence for the use of extra-grammatical parsing strategies that restructure a mismatched antecedent to satisfy the syntactic constraints on ellipsis (Arregui et al. 2006; Kim et al. 2011). In this paper, I argue that it is unnecessary to posit a special class of parserspecific rules to capture the observed profiles, and that acceptable mismatches do not reflect a parser-grammar misalignment. Rather, such effects are a natural consequence of a single structure-building system (i.e., the grammar) that relies on noisy, domain-general memory access mechanisms to retrieve an antecedent from memory. In Experiment 1, I confirm the acceptability profiles reported in previous work. Then in Experiment 2, as proof-of-concept, I show using an established computational model of memory retrieval that the observed acceptability profiles follow from independently motivated principles of working memory, without invoking multiple representational systems. These results contribute to a uniform memory-based account of acceptable ungrammaticalities for a wide range of dependencies.

Error-Driven Retrieval in Agreement Attraction Rarely Leads to Misinterpretation

“…Similar proposals have also been made to account for the systematic misinterpretation of antecedent-ellipsis mismatches (Arregui et al, 2006; Frazier, 2013; but cf. Parker, 2018).…”

Introduction to the special issue Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis

“…Kaan et al 2004, Yoshida et al 2012. But even regardless of what questions it is intended to probe, psycholinguistic experimentation helps establish stronger links between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, given the latter's equally long-standing interest in the online processing of the unusual mapping between form and meaning that ellipsis represents (from Murphy 1985and Tanenhaus & Carlson 1990to Martin & McElree 2011, Frazier 2013, and Parker 2018). We will see two of the contributions (Kaps and Nykiel et al) engage, directly or indirectly, with the processing dimension of ellipsis.…”

Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study

“…1 This model was developed within the general cognitive architecture, Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R, Anderson et al 2004). Cuebased retrieval models can explain interference effects (Dillon et al, 2013;Jäger, Engelmann, & Vasishth, 2015;Kush & Phillips, 2014;Nicenboim, Logačev, Gattei, & Vasishth, 2016;Nicenboim, Vasishth, Engelmann, & Suckow, 2018;Parker & Phillips, 2016Patil, Vasishth, & Lewis, 2016;Vasishth, Bruessow, Lewis, & Drenhaus, 2008), but they have also been invoked in connection with a range of other issues in sentence processing: the interaction between predictive processing and memory (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011), impairments in individuals with aphasia (Mätzig, Vasishth, Engelmann, Caplan, & Burchert, 2018;Patil, Hanne, Burchert, Bleser, & Vasishth, 2016), the interaction between oculomotor control and sentence comprehension (Dotlačil, 2018;Engelmann, Vasishth, Engbert, & Kliegl, 2013), the processing of ellipsis (Martin & McElree, 2009;Parker, 2018), the effect of working memory capacity differences on underspecification and "good-enough" processing (Engelmann, 2016;von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2013), and the interaction between discourse/semantic processes and cognition (Brasoveanu & Dotlačil, 2019). The source code of the model used in this paper is available from https://github.com/felixengelmann/inter-act; and quantitative predictions can be derived graphically using the Shiny App available from https://engelmann.shinyapps.io/inter-act/.…”