Attention and empirical studies of grammar

Myachykov, Andriy; Tomlin, Russell S.; Posner, Michael I.

doi:10.1515/tlir.2005.22.2-4.347

Cited by 31 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…For example, he observes that Ferreira (2005) and Myachykov, Tomlin, and Posner (2005) "bemoan" alienation of psycholinguists from formal linguistics (Jackendoff 2007: 351). A simple answer is: "No, we don't".…”

Section: Theory and Methods In Language Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So far, the empirical evidence for such interplay is limited and controversial. Some studies suggest that speakers' syntactic choices directly depend on the perceptual properties of the described world (Olson and Filby 1972;Tomlin 1995;Forrest 1997;Myachykov, Tomlin, and Posner 2005;Gleitman et al in press). Others maintain that the way we perceive the world has little to do with the subsequent syntactic choices.…”

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is important to draw a cautious demarcation line between the visually-cued production studies that elicit alternating syntactic structures (e.g., Tomlin 1995;Myachykov, Tomlin, and Posner 2005) from those interested in the speakers' choice of the sentential starting point (e.g., Forrest 1997;Gleitman, et al in press). The reason for such separation is primarily theoretical: While both types of studies make claims about the syntactic choices, in fact only the tasks used in the former group require changing the sentential frame (e.g., Voice alternation).…”

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All things equal, speakers of both languages behaved similarly in making their structural choices, but the necessity in Russian to (1) The next set of experiments, or Experiments 3 and 4, accordingly, revealed that in languages that use case marking to denote sentential roles, this additional grammatical operation complicates regular mapping from perceptually prominent referents to the prominent sentential roles. The first study was discussed in Myachykov, Tomlin, and Posner (2005). It demonstrated that Russian speakers are more likely to rely upon canonical grammar than their English counterparts.…”

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A parallel interface for language and cognition in sentence production: Theory, method, and experimental evidence

Myachykov¹,

Posner²,

Tomlin³

2007

The Linguistic Review

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The debate about the place of linguistic theory in cognitive science encouraged by The Linguistic Review is a good example of communication between different research communities. In this follow-up paper we (1) clarify our theoretical and methodological positions, (2) propose a theoretical model for language production similar to Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, and (2) Theory and method in language researchIn his seminal book, Foundations of Language (FL, 2002), Jackendoff proposed a very powerful and ambitious model of language organization. Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture has a great theoretical promise as it suggests a solid and empirically informed account of the language faculty that goes beyond the focus on competence common among generativists. As such, it incorporates and is consistent with, a great deal of experimental evidence about neural and psychological reality behind language accumulated in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. It also makes specific predictions about the chronometrical and functional properties of language-cognition We agree with Jackendoff that many contributors to the Special Issue of The Linguistic Review (TLR), including ourselves, chose an easy way to justify their critique of the syntactic bias of generative linguistics. It is true that most critics largely overlooked the motivation of Jackendoff's parallel architecture as a theory that addresses the variety of phonological, semantic, and pragmatic parameters of language as well as its relation to other cognitive domains in favor of criticizing classical Chomskian generativism. An attentive reader should not only notice that Jackendoff's proposal retains very little of classical Chomskian separation between competence and performance, but also that Jackendoff's model possesses important properties that help to reduce the level of encapsulation within the levels of language organization as well as to relate linguistic processes to less specialized cognitive domains. As such, Parallel Architecture has a much greater explanatory power and functional efficiency.The publication of FL encouraged a discussion of the place of linguistic theory in our understanding of cognitive mechanisms of language organization, its evolution, and development in human mind. It may be useful to invert this question and ask what role psychological and neuroscientific explorations can play in developing a better theoretical account of language? Answering these questions will require both linguists who are ready to study psychology and statistical methods and psychologists who are not shy to take a course in theoretical linguistics. The special issue (TLR) was an important attempt to bring together researchers from fields usually separated by theoretical and methodological barriers. Hopefully, these barriers are not impenetrable. The discussion continues, and Jackendoff's reply to this special issue of TLR can indeed "play the role of a simulated conversation among its authors", both virtual and actual (Jackendo...

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Section: Theory and Methods In Language Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interfacing Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A parallel interface for language and cognition in sentence production: Theory, method, and experimental evidence

Myachykov¹,

Posner²,

Tomlin³

2007

The Linguistic Review

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“…exogenously manipulating the attention of speakers (that is, by introducing a visual arrow to cue speaker attention) towards either agent or patient of an event, an experimenter could essentially force speakers to produce either active clauses (cued agent > subject) or passive clauses (cued patient > subject) in accusative languages (English, Japanese, Malagassy, and another 15). 17 Alongside this experimental paradigm, additional studies have expanded on the role of attention in grammar(Henderson and Ferreira 2004;Myachykov, Posner and Tomlin 2005;Myachykov, Tomlin and Posner 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Manifestations of ergativity in Amazonia

Queixalós

Gildea

2010

Typological Studies in Language

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as part of a programme of joint projects called Programmes internationaux de coopération scientifique (PICS). The Ergativity project was hosted at the Laboratório de Línguas Indígenas (LALI) of the University of Brazilia, directed by Prof. Aryon Rodrigues. The French collaborator was Francesc Queixalós, Centre d'Etudes des Langues Indigènes d'Amérique. The three annual workshops held during the project gathered colleagues from several countries, including Brazil, France, Peru, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, and Spain, all but one working on first hand data from living Amazonian languages. The working papers of the project can be accessed at: 1

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Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences

Wallentin

Rocca

Stroustrup

2019

J Psycholinguist Res

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We investigated biases in the organization of imagery by asking participants to make stick-figure drawings of sentences containing a man, a woman and a transitive action (e.g. She kisses that guy). Previous findings show that prominent features of meaning and sentence structure are placed to the left in drawings, according to reading direction (e.g. Stroustrup & Wallentin, 2018). Five hundred thirty participants listened to sentences in Danish and made 8 drawings each. We replicated three findings: 1) that the first mentioned element is placed to the left more often, 2) that the agent in the sentence is placed to the left, and 3) that the grammatical subject is placed to the left of the object. We further tested hypotheses related to deixis and gender stereotypes. By adding demonstratives (e.g. Danish equivalents of this and that), that have been found to indicate attentional prominence, we tested the hypothesis that this is also translated into a left-ward bias in the produced drawings. We were unable to find support for this hypothesis. Analyses of gender biases tested the presence of a gender identification and a gender stereotype effect. According to the identification hypothesis, participants should attribute prominence to their own gender and draw it to the left, and according to the stereotype effect participants should be more prone to draw the male character to the left, regardless of own gender. We were not able to find significant support for either of the two gender effects. The combination of replications and null-findings suggest that the left-ward bias in the drawing experiment might be narrowly tied to left-to-right distribution in written language and less to overall prominence. No effect of handedness was observed.

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Attention and empirical studies of grammar

Abstract: How is the generation of a grammatical sentence implemented by the human

Cited by 31 publications

References 38 publications

A parallel interface for language and cognition in sentence production: Theory, method, and experimental evidence

A parallel interface for language and cognition in sentence production: Theory, method, and experimental evidence

Manifestations of ergativity in Amazonia

Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences

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