Revise and resubmit: How real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition

Abstract

We present the results from a three-day artificial language learning study on adults. The study examined whether sentence-parsing limitations, in particular, difficulties revising initial syntactic/semantic commitments during comprehension, shape learners’ ability to acquire a language. Findings show that both comprehension and production of morphology pertaining to sentence argument structure are delayed when this morphology consistently appears at the end, rather than at the beginning, of sentences in otherwise identical grammatical systems. This suggests that real-time processing constraints impact acquisition; morphological cues that tend to guide linguistic analyses are easier to learn than cues that revise these analyses. Parallel performance in production and comprehension indicates that parsing constraints affect grammatical acquisition, not just real-time commitments. Properties of the linguistic system (e.g., ordering of cues within a sentence) interact with the properties of the cognitive system (cognitive control and conflict-resolution abilities) and together affect language acquisition.

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

“…Via structure‐mapping, “extra” noun phrases accompanying novel verbs should cause errors. Several investigations confirm this prediction (e.g., Dautriche et al, ; Pozzan & Trueswell, ). For instance, Gertner and Fisher () found that 21‐month‐olds tended to interpret intransitive sentences with two noun phrases conjoined in subject position as if they were transitive, mistakenly linking “The boy and the girl are pilking!” with an event in which a boy acted on a girl.…”

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

“…For example, a straightforward prediction of the finding that children (and perhaps language learners, in general) experience difficulties revising initial interpretations is that language-specific properties that are likely associated with revision (e.g., they arrive late in a sentence, after the parser has already committed to an interpretation) will be harder for children to learn, and, for this reason, more subject to change (see Pozzan & Trueswell, in press; Trueswell, Kaufman, Hafri, & Lidz, 2012). …”

Adaptation to syntactic structures in native and nonnative sentence comprehension

“…In addition, initial, but ultimately incorrect interpretations have been shown to lead to priming effects even in cases in which readers successfully obtained the target structure (van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Jacob, 2006). Research on L2 learners suggests that learners have more problems rejecting initial, incorrect interpretations (Jacob & Felser, 2016; Pozzan & Trueswell, 2015, 2016), or suffer more from interfering materials in general than do monolinguals (Cunnings, 2017). If the initial structure lingers, this may affect the processing of the next item with a similar ambiguity, which in turn may affect adaptation.…”