Locality and Word Order in Active Dependency Formation in Bangla

Chacón, Dustin Alfonso; Imtiaz, Mashrur; Dasgupta, Shirsho; Murshed, Sikder Monoare; Dan, Mina; Phillips, Colin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01235

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(125 reference statements)

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“…An important and robust finding in sentence processing is that comprehenders actively construct filler-gap dependencies (Fodor 1978;Crain & Fodor 1985;Stowe 1986;Traxler & Pickering 1996;Kaan et al 2000;Aoshima et al 2004;Phillips et al 2005;Chacón et al 2016), and that these processes appear to be suppressed in syntactic island configurations (Stowe 1986;Traxler & Pickering 1996;Phillips 2006;Yoshida et al 2014;Chacón 2015). These findings have been argued to reflect rapid deployment of fine-grained grammatical constraints.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many studies have demonstrated that the gap site is constructed shortly after the filler is identified, a process called active dependency formation (Fodor 1978;Crain & Fodor 1985;Stowe 1986;Traxler & Pickering 1996;Kaan et al 2000;Aoshima et al 2004;Phillips et al 2005;Omaki et al 2015;Chacón et al 2016, see Pablos 2008 for review). For instance, Stowe (1986) found that reading times increased at the object us in (2) compared to controls.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

Chacón

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In processing filler-gap dependencies, comprehenders quickly postulate gaps in syntactically licensed positions, but not in syntactic islands. This suggests that comprehenders can accurately use syntactic constraints to guide processing. However, resumptive pronouns appear to challenge this generalization. Resumption is ungrammatical in English. Nevertheless, they appear to immediately allow resolution of a filler dependency in syntactic islands (Hofmeister & Norcliffe 2013). I resolve this tension by arguing that pronouns are analyzed as resumptive when typical filler-gap dependency processing fails. I argue that processing a filler-gap dependency requires anticipatorily building a gapped structure. However, as further linguistic material is processed, this representation degrades in memory. Resumption facilitates processing by triggering a reference dependency, which allows the comprehender to recover a coherent interpretation of the sentence. This predicts that the accessibility of filler NP as a referent for a pronoun, length, and processing difficulty all contribute to the acceptability of resumption. I present the results of four acceptability judgment studies that support this claim. I also introduce a novel experimental paradigm, in which participants' working memory capacity is taxed while processing a sentence. This increase in processing strain decreases sensitivity to ungrammatical filler dependencies. I argue that this partially explains the acceptability of resumption in syntactic island contexts, which are likely resource-intensive.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

Chacón

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…There is a wealth of cross-methodological evidence that comprehenders actively construct filler-gap dependencies: electrophysiology using EEG (Garnsey et al, 1989), eye-tracking while reading paradigm (Traxler and Pickering, 1996), eyemovements in the visual world paradigm (Sussman and Sedivy, 2003), self-paced reading (Lee, 2004), among many others. There is also evidence that active dependency formation is crosslinguistically robust: Bangla (Chacón et al, 2016), Chamorro (Wagers et al, 2015), Dutch (Frazier and Flores d'Arcais, 1989), German (Schlesewsky et al, 2000), Italian (Vincenzi, 1991), Japanese (Aoshima et al, 2004), and Russian (Sekerina, 2003), to name a few. There is also evidence that it is robust in both neurotypical and aphasic populations (Dickey et al, 2007).…”

Section: Comprehenders Actively Construct Filler-gap Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Predictive Value of Tagalog Voice Morphology in Filler-Gap Dependency Formation

Pizarro-Guevara

Wagers

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Research has shown that when processing filler-gap dependencies, comprehenders do not wait until they encounter all of the bottom-up information in the input. Instead, they use various types of linguistic information to predictively posit a gap that would allow the dependency to be resolved. They can use syntactic (Traxler and Pickering, 1996), lexical (Trueswell et al., 1994), morphological (Kamide et al., 2003), and prosodic (Nagel et al., 1994) information. Here we examine whether Tagalog comprehenders use the language's voice morphology to guide their incremental interpretations. We hypothesized that voice allows comprehenders to commit to an interpretation upon encountering the verb, since they have information about the event structure at this point in time and by virtue of the voice morphology, the thematic role of the filler. In experiment 1, using an acceptability judgment study, we found that comprehenders differed in how they used the different voices in different filler-gap contexts to detect the licitness of displacements. These differences may have consequences for how voice is used in real-time. In experiments 2 and 3, using the stops-making-sense paradigm (Boland et al., 1990), we found that comprehenders used voice as a cue to actively associate the filler with the gap. However, in experiment 3, the way in which they used voice varied by type and varied across types of filler-gap dependencies. We argue that comprehenders were using construction-specific cue validities when processing filler-gap dependencies. However, they also engaged with other classes of linguistic information, including (but not limited to) information about the structural similarities and the thematic complexity of the dependencies involved, and the relative frequency of the different types of voices in the language. These interactions resulted in processing asymmetries.

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“…Psycholinguistic research with adults has provided much evidence for active dependency formation bias, i.e., incremental completion of the dependency at the earliest possible position (Aoshima, Phillips, & Weinberg, 2004;Chacón et al, 2016;Crain & Fodor, 1985;Frazier, 1987;Frazier & Clifton, 1989;Frazier & Flores D'Arcais, 1989;Garnsey, Tanenhaus, & Chapman, 1989;Johnson, Fiorentino, & Gabriele, 2016;McElree & Griffith, 1998;Omaki & Schulz, 2011;Parker, 2017;Pickering & Traxler, 2003;Staub, 2010;Stowe, 1986;Traxler & Pickering, 1996;Wagers, Borja, & Chung, 2015;Wagers & Pendleton, 2016). For example, an eye-tracking during reading study by Traxler and Pickering (1996) manipulated the Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency 11 semantic fit of the filler and the verb (e.g., … the city/book that the author wrote about…), and found reading time increase at the verb region when the filler was an implausible object of the verb (city-wrote) compared to when it was a plausible object of the verb (book-wrote).…”

Section: Filler-gap Dependency Processing In Adultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency processing

et al. 2018

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Much work has demonstrated that children are able to use bottom-up linguistic cues to incrementally interpret sentences, but there is little understanding of the extent to which children's comprehension mechanisms are guided by top-down linguistic information that can be learned from distributional regularities in the input. Using a visual world eye tracking experiment and a corpus analysis, the current study investigates whether 5-and 6-year-old children incrementally assign interpretations to temporarily ambiguous wh-questions like What was Emily eating the cake with __? In the visual world eye-tracking experiment, adults demonstrated evidence for active dependency formation at the earliest region (i.e., the verb region), while 6-year-old children demonstrated a spill-over effect of this bias in the subsequent NP region. No evidence for this bias was found in 5-year-olds, although the speed of arrival at the ultimately correct instrument interpretation appears to be modulated by the vocabulary size. These results suggest that adult-like active formation of filler-gap dependencies begins to emerge around age 6. The corpus analysis of filler-gap dependency structures in adult corpora and child corpora demonstrate that the distributional regularities in either corpora are equally in favor of early, incremental completion of filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that the distributional information in the input is either not relevant to this incremental bias, or that 5-year-old children are somehow unable to recruit this information in real-time comprehension. Taken together, these findings shed light on the origin of incremental processing bias in filler-gap dependency processing, as well as on the role of language experience and cognitive constraints in the development of incremental sentence processing mechanisms.

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Locality and Word Order in Active Dependency Formation in Bangla

Cited by 11 publications

References 71 publications

Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

The Predictive Value of Tagalog Voice Morphology in Filler-Gap Dependency Formation

Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency processing

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