Capitalization interacts with syntactic complexity.

Abstract

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesised that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories.

A Compositional Neural Architecture for Language

“…Perceptual inference asserts that sensory cues activate latent representations in the neural system that have been learned through experience. 4 In line with this idea, there is everaccumulating evidence that "lower level" cues like speech rate and phoneme perception (e.g., Kaufeld, Ravenschlag, Meyer, Martin, & Bosker, 2019;Kaufeld, Naumann, Meyer, Bosker, & Martin, 2019;Heffner, Dilley, McAuley, & Pitt, 2013;Dilley & Pitt, 2010), morphology (e.g., Gwilliams, Linzen, Poeppel, & Marantz, 2018;Martin, Monahan, & Samuel, 2017), foveal and parafoveally processed orthography (e.g., Cutter, Martin, & Sturt, 2019;Veldre & Andrews, 2018;Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012), as well as "higher level" sentential (e.g., Kutas, Ferreira, & Martin, 2018;Martin & McElree, 2008van Alphen & Table 1.…”

Information structural effects in processing contrastive ellipsis: Eye-tracking evidence from a flexible word order language

“…There were no significant effects or trends on the M atrix S ubject or V erb & A dverb regions. On the M atrix O bject region, there was a significant penalty for Subject conditions (M = 345 ms, SE = 13) over Object conditions (M = 308 ms, SE = 9), β = 0.043 (± 0.016), t = 2.685, p <.01, possibly due to an orthographic preview effect arising from the following R emnant region beginning in an uppercase letter in the Subject conditions (see Cutter et al 2019, for similar preview effects from capitalisation). There were no significant effects or trends in first pass times on the R emnant , S pillover or W rap - up regions.…”

“…Italicised labels correspond to analysis regions. Cutter et al 2019, for similar preview effects from capitalisation). There were no significant effects or trends in first pass times on the REMNANT, SPILLOVER or WRAP-UP regions.…”

Readers detect an low-level phonological violation between two parafoveal words

“…As well as adding to a literature showing that readers assess the fit of a parafoveal word with preceding words in the sentence, our study also adds to a literature suggesting that people may sometime use (relatively) low-level information from words in order to assess their contextual fit. For example, Cutter et al (2020b) recently demonstrated that people may use initial-letter capitalisation as a cue that an upcoming word is a proper noun prior to completing lexical processing of that word. In our study readers were seemingly assessing whether word n + 2 was compatible with the preceding article on the basis of its orthographic form, with their being little chance that readers could have processed this word substantially enough for the effect to be postlexical.…”