The real-time comprehension of WH-dependencies in a WH-agreement language

Wagers, Matthew; Borja, Manuel F.; Chung, Sandra

doi:10.1353/lan.2015.0001

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…replicated experiment 2, and are consistent with studies supporting active dependency formation (Crain and Fodor, 1985;Frazier, 1987;Frazier and Clifton, 1987, inter alia). They are also consistent with the idea that comprehenders use various sources of linguistic information-lexico-semantic (Boland et al, 1990(Boland et al, , 1995Trueswell et al, 1994) and morphosyntactic ones (Kamide et al, 2003;Wagers et al, 2015), for example-to form said dependency.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…More directly related to the present study is the investigation by Wagers et al (2015) of what is called wh-agreement in the generative syntax literature and its contribution in processing filler-gap dependencies in Chamorro, an Austronesian language distantly related to Tagalog. When present, wh-agreement provides direct morphological evidence for the presence of a filler-gap dependency and for the grammatical function of the gap (i.e., whether it is the subject or the object).…”

Section: Comprehenders Actively Construct Filler-gap Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…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%

“…In fact, only 10 languages make up the bulk (∼85%) of the research on language processing (Anand et al, 2011). Despite the fact that the Austronesian language family accounts for 5-17% of the world's linguistic diversity (Eberhard et al, 2019), it is "virtually absent from psycholinguistic research" (Wagers et al, 2015). Thus, the present study is of theoretical import because it addresses directly this lacuna by investigating a heavily underrepresented language (family)-one that is typologically different from the more familiar languages that are well-characterized in the psycholinguistics literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Comprehenders Actively Construct Filler-gap Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Comprehenders Actively Construct Filler-gap Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pizarro-Guevara

Wagers

2020

Front. Psychol.

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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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Studying Psycholinguistics out of the Lab

Speed,

Wnuk,

Majid

2017

Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language

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Traditional psycholinguistic studies take place in controlled experimental labs and typically involve testing undergraduate psychology or linguistics students. Investigating psycholinguistics in this manner calls into question the external validity of findings, that is, the extent to which research findings generalize across languages and cultures, as well as ecologically valid settings. Here we consider three ways in which psycho linguistics can be taken out of the lab. First, researchers can conduct cross-cultural fieldwork in diverse languages and cultures. Second, they can conduct online experiments or experiments in institutionalized public spaces (e.g., museums) to obtain large, diverse participant samples. And, third, researchers can perform studies in more ecologically valid settings, to increase the real-world generalizability of findings. By moving away from the traditional lab setting, psycholinguists can enrich their understanding of language use in all its rich and diverse contexts.

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The real-time comprehension of WH-dependencies in a WH-agreement language

Cited by 12 publications

References 57 publications

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

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

Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency processing

Studying Psycholinguistics out of the Lab

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