Judgements about double-embedded relative clauses differ between languages

Frank, Stefan L.; Ernst, Patty

doi:10.31234/osf.io/j3htp

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…This study also show that the use of prepositions in relative clauses in object position except accusative case may pose a problem for second language learners owing to the possible effect of first language. Other researchers also mentioned the difficulties of acquisition of relative clauses in object position since these constructions are often studied hierarchically (Comrie, 1989;Frank and Ernst, 2018;Gibson, 1998;Hamilton, 1995;Kayne, 1994;Keenan and Comrie, 1977;O'Grady, 2011;Thornton, 2016;Wu, Kaiser and Vasishth, 2018). The findings of these studies are in parallel with this study because prepositions affect the processing of relative clauses in object relative clauses.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…Therefore, different theories have been suggested regarding the acquisition of relative clause constructions. The acquisition of relative clauses, which were previously studied theoretically and typologically, still remains a mystery (Andrews, 2007;Chomsky, 1965;Comrie, 1989;Diessel, 2004;Downing, 1978;Duarte et al, 2015;Frank and Ernst, 2018;Gibson, 1998;* Dr. Öğretim Üyesi, Syracuse Üniversitesi, Dil Bilim Bölümü, eserordem@gmail.com Hamilton, 1995;Kayne, 1994;Keenan and Comrie, 1977;O'Grady, 2011;Thornton, 2016;Wu, Kaiser and Vasishth, 2018;Wiechmann, 2015). Larsen-Freeman's (1997) complexity theory can also show why certain structures are harder to process, understand and produce.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of Object Relative Clauses by Turkish Adult Learners of English

Ordem

2020

Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences

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The acquisition of complex sentences plays an important role in first and second language studies because evidence of complex sentences in the field of theoretical and applied language is still evolving. 40 sophomore and junior students majoring in Translation and Interpreting were involved in the study. Participants first took a standard test, the Michigan test. The aim of this test was to provide homogeneity in the study. The participants then received 5 different data collection tools. First of all, grammaticality judgment test was given to the participants to check to what extent they provided the accuracy of the sentences. Then the participants were asked to make sentences about object relative clauses In the third stage, the participants were asked to produce at least 20 different pictures and sentences. In the fourth stage, they were told to repeat the object relative clause constructions. In the final stage, the participants were given Turkish sentences and be translated into English. At the end of the study, important data about the acquisition of adjective clauses in object position were reached. The results of the study show that most of the participants tended to avoid using ablative prepositions possible due to the effect of first language that uses only one suffix, while they performed far better in accusative case. Öz Karmaşık cümlelerin edinimi, birinci ve ikinci dil çalışmalarında önemli bir rol oynamaktadır, çünkü teorik ve uygulamalı dil alanındaki karmaşık cümlelerin kanıtları hala gelişmektedir. Çalışmaya 40 ikinci sınıf öğrencisi ve Çevirmenlik ve Çevirmenlik bölümünden mezun olan genç öğrenciler katılmıştır. Katılımcılar ilk önce standart bir test olan Michigan testini aldı. Bu testin amacı, çalışmada homojenliği sağlamaktı. Katılımcılar daha sonra 5 farklı veri toplama aracı aldı. Her şeyden önce, katılımcılara cümlelerin doğruluğunu ne ölçüde sağladıklarını kontrol etmek için gramerlik değerlendirme testi uygulandı. Daha sonra katılımcılardan nesne ile ilgili cümlecikler hakkında cümleler kurmaları istenmiştir. Üçüncü aşamada katılımcılardan en az 20 farklı resim ve cümle üretmeleri istenmiştir. Dördüncü aşamada, nesneye göre yan tümce yapılarını tekrarlamaları söylendi. Son aşamada katılımcılara Türkçe cümleler verildi ve İngilizce'ye çevrildi. Çalışmanın sonunda, nesne sıfat sıfat cümleciklerinin alınmasıyla ilgili önemli verilere ulaşıldı. Çalışmanın sonuçları, katılımcıların çoğunun, sadece bir sonek kullanan ilk dilin etkisinden dolayı mümkün olan ablatif edatları kullanmaktan kaçınma eğiliminde olduklarını göstermektedir.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of Object Relative Clauses by Turkish Adult Learners of English

Ordem

2020

Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences

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“…German materials are shown in the sentences (4); these are word‐for‐word translations of the English materials in (3). Vasishth et al () probed the structural forgetting effect using reading times for material after the end of the verb phrases, and Frank and Ernst () have replicated the effect using acceptability judgments (but see Bader, ; Häussler & Bader, , for complicating evidence).…”

Section: Structural Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lossy‐Context Surprisal: An Information‐Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing

2020

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A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.

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“…Such models use recurrent neural networks with some fixed number of neurons, which can be understood as a specific kind of constrained memory. A case in point is the observation that forgetting effects in nested head-final dependencies are reduced or absent in head-final structures (Vasishth et al, 2010;Frank et al, 2015b;Frank and Ernst, 2019), which has been modeled using connectionist models (Engelmann and Vasishth, 2009;Frank et al, 2015b), which can be interpreted as modeling surprisal conditioned on imperfect memory (Futrell et al, 2020b).…”

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confidence: 99%

Modeling word and morpheme order in natural language as an efficient trade-off of memory and surprisal.

Hahn¹,

Degen²,

Futrell³

2021

Psychological Review

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Memory limitations are known to constrain language comprehension and production, and have been argued to account for crosslinguistic word order regularities. However, a systematic assessment of the role of memory limitations in language structure has proven elusive, in part because it is hard to extract precise large-scale quantitative generalizations about language from existing mechanistic models of memory use in sentence processing. We provide an architecture-independent information-theoretic formalization of memory limitations which enables a simple calculation of the memory efficiency of languages. Our notion of memory efficiency is based on the idea of a memory-surprisal tradeoff : a certain level of average surprisal per word can only be achieved at the cost of storing some amount of information about past context. Based on this notion of memory usage, we advance the Efficient Tradeoff Hypothesis: the order of elements in natural language is under pressure to enable favorable memorysurprisal tradeoffs. We derive that languages enable more efficient tradeoffs when they exhibit information locality: when predictive information about an element is concentrated in its recent past. We provide empirical evidence from three test domains in support of the Efficient Tradeoff Hypothesis: a reanalysis of a miniature artificial language learning experiment, a large-scale study of word order in corpora of 54 languages, and an analysis of morpheme order in two agglutinative languages. These results suggest that principles of order in natural language can be explained via highly generic cognitively motivated principles and lend support to efficiency-based models of the structure of human language.

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Judgements about double-embedded relative clauses differ between languages

Cited by 3 publications

References 27 publications

Acquisition of Object Relative Clauses by Turkish Adult Learners of English

Acquisition of Object Relative Clauses by Turkish Adult Learners of English

Lossy‐Context Surprisal: An Information‐Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing

Modeling word and morpheme order in natural language as an efficient trade-off of memory and surprisal.

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