The Contributions of Verb Bias and Plausibility to the Comprehension of Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences

Garnsey, Susan M.; Pearlmutter, Neal J.; Myers, Elizabeth; Lotocky, Melanie A.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2512

Cited by 546 publications

(608 citation statements)

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“…In this respect, our results conflict with previous studies that have found transitivity biases to play an important role in initial parsing preferences (e.g., Garnsey, Perlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993) and are consistent with other studies finding a delayed effect of verb biases, if an effect appeared at all (e.g., Ferreira & Henderson, 1990;Kennison, 2001;Pickering & Traxler, 2003;Pickering, Traxler, & Crocker, 2000). We wish to emphasize that the results of the present experiments do not suggest that frequency plays no role in initial parsing preferences.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 61%

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Staub

Clifton

Frazier

2006

Journal of Memory and Language

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Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb, which was either obligatorily transitive or had a high transitivity bias (e.g., Jack praised/watched from the stands his daughter's attempt to shoot a basket). Experiment 2 compared unshifted sentences to sentences in which an adverb intervened between the verb and its object, and obligatorily transitive verbs to optionally transitive verbs with widely varying transitivity biases. In both experiments, evidence of processing difficulty appeared on the material that intervened between the verb and its object when the verb was obligatorily transitive, and on the shifted direct object when the verb was optionally transitive, regardless of transitivity bias. We conclude that the parser adopts the heavy NP shift analysis only when it is forced to by the grammar, which we interpret in terms of a preference for immediate incremental interpretation. KeywordsSentence comprehension; Parsing; Heavy NP shift; Argument structure; Eye movements Consider the comprehension of sentences in which a direct object is separated from the verb by intervening material, as in (1) below: (1) Lucy ate t i with a fork [the extremely delicious, bright green broccoli] i . This construction is known as heavy NP shift. According to the classic syntactic account (Ross, 1967; but cf. Kayne, 1998;Rochemont & Culicover, 1997), heavy NP shift involves a movement operation that displaces the verb's direct object from its underlying position adjacent to the verb, where it receives both accusative case and a thematic role, to an adjoined position to the right of other verbal arguments and/or adjuncts. As in other movement operations, a trace of the moved constituent remains in the pre-movement position. Notably, heavy NP shift is typically able to apply only when the direct object noun phrase is relatively long or "heavy" relative to the intervening constituent, as evidenced by the comparative awkwardness of (2a) and the unacceptability of (2b):

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 61%

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Staub

Clifton

Frazier

2006

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…In many cases, similar results have been obtained, but this is not always the case (Just, Carpenter, & Woolley, 1982;Kennedy & Murray, 1984;Magliano, Graesser, Eymard, Haberlandt, & Gholson, 1993). Researchers interested in the topic of Syntactic ambiguity and parsing have been particularly keen to show that similar results are obtained when self-paced reading and eye movement data are compared (see Ferreira & Clifton, 1986;Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997;Kennedy & Murray, 1984;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993); indeed many results are quite similar across the two situations. Perhaps it is not surprising that, when dealing with syntactic ambiguity where readers are "garden-pathed" and have difficulty getting the appropriate meaning, self-paced reading and eye movement data are quite similar because processing has been disrupted and readers must use some type of problemsolving strategy to compute the correct meaning.…”

Section: Using Eye Movements To Study Language Processing In Readingmentioning

confidence: 89%

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

6,144

231

5,590

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Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative studies. It would appear from the vast number of studies using eye movement data over the past 20 years that research in this third era is fulfilling the promise inherent in using eye movement behavior to infer cognitive processes. The first era of eye movement research extended from Javal's initial observations concerning the role of eye movements in reading in 1879 (see Huey, 1908) up until about 1920. During this era, many basic facts about eye movements were discovered. Issues such as saccadic suppression (the fact that we do not perceive information during an eye movement), saccade latency (the time that it takes to initiate an eye movement), and the size of the perceptual span (the region of effective vision) were of concern in this era. The second era, which coincided with the behaviorist movement in experimental psychology, tended to have a more applied focus, and little research was undertaken with eye movements to infer cognitive processes. Although classic work by Tinker (1946) on reading and by Buswell (1935) on scene perception was carried out during this era, in retrospect, most of the work seems to have focused on the eye movements per se (or on surface aspects of the task being investigated). Tinker's (1958) final review ended on the rather pessimistic note that almost every-

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“…However, this does not mean that there is no role for lexical information in modeling reading times. The experimental literature offers broad evidence for the fact that sentence processing relies on lexical information, such as subcategorization frame frequencies (e.g., Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993) and thematic role preferences (e.g., Garnsey et al, 1997;Pickering, Traxler, & Crocker, 2000). Recent probabilistic models of human sentence processing have attempted to integrate such information with the structural probabilities generated by a parser (Narayanan & Jurafsky, 2002;Padó, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

2008

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We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. However, DLT successfully predicts reading times for nouns and verbs. We also find evidence for integration cost effects at auxiliaries, not predicted by DLT. For surprisal, we demonstrate that an unlexicalized formulation of surprisal can predict reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. Comparing DLT integration cost and surprisal, we find that the two measures are uncorrelated, which suggests that a complete theory will need to incorporate both aspects of processing complexity. We conclude that eye-tracking corpora, which provide reading time data for naturally occurring, contextualized sentences, can complement experimental evidence as a basis for theories of processing complexity.

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The Contributions of Verb Bias and Plausibility to the Comprehension of Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences

Cited by 546 publications

References 5 publications

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

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