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Lago S, Acuña Fariña C, Meseguer E. The Reading Signatures of Agreement Attraction. Open Mind (Camb) 2021; 5:132-153. [PMID: 35024528 PMCID: PMC8746120 DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00047] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/14/2021] [Accepted: 08/05/2021] [Indexed: 11/04/2022] Open
Abstract
The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows "attraction effects," which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this "grammaticality asymmetry" by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
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Franck J, Wagers M. Hierarchical structure and memory mechanisms in agreement attraction. PLoS One 2020; 15:e0232163. [PMID: 32428038 PMCID: PMC7237028 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232163] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/21/2019] [Accepted: 04/08/2020] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Speakers occasionally produce verbs that agree with an element that is not the subject, a so-called 'attractor'; likewise, comprehenders occasionally fail to notice agreement errors when the verb agrees with the attractor. Cross-linguistic studies converge in showing that attraction is modulated by the hierarchical position of the attractor in the sentence structure. We report two experiments exploring the link between structural position and memory representations in attraction. The method used is innovative in two respects: we used jabberwocky materials to control for semantic influences and focus on structural agreement processing, and we used a Speed-Accuracy Trade-off (SAT) design combined with a memory probe recognition task, as classically used in list memorization tasks. SAT enabled the joint measurement of retrieval speed and retrieval accuracy of subjects and attractors in sentences that typically elicit attraction errors. Experiment 1 first established that attraction arises in jabberwocky sentences, to a similar extent and showing structure-dependency effects, as in natural sentences. Experiment 2 showed a close alignment between the attraction profiles found in Experiment 1 and memory parameters. Results support a content-addressable architecture of memory representations for sentences in which nouns' accessibility depends on their syntactic position, while subjects are kept in the focus of attention.
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Affiliation(s)
- Julie Franck
- Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Matthew Wagers
- Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, United States of America
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Parker D. Cue Combinatorics in Memory Retrieval for Anaphora. Cogn Sci 2019; 43:e12715. [DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12715] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/17/2018] [Revised: 01/23/2019] [Accepted: 01/30/2019] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Dan Parker
- Department of English Linguistics Program College of William & Mary
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Villata S, Tabor W, Franck J. Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement. Front Psychol 2018; 9:2. [PMID: 29403414 PMCID: PMC5780450 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00002] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2017] [Accepted: 01/03/2018] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Long-distance verb-argument dependencies generally require the integration of a fronted argument when the verb is encountered for sentence interpretation. Under a parsing model that handles long-distance dependencies through a cue-based retrieval mechanism, retrieval is hampered when retrieval cues also resonate with non-target elements (retrieval interference). However, similarity-based interference may also stem from interference arising during the encoding of elements in memory (encoding interference), an effect that is not directly accountable for by a cue-based retrieval mechanism. Although encoding and retrieval interference are clearly distinct at the theoretical level, it is difficult to disentangle the two on empirical grounds, since encoding interference may also manifest at the retrieval region. We report two self-paced reading experiments aimed at teasing apart the role of each component in gender and number subject-verb agreement in Italian and English object relative clauses. In Italian, the verb does not agree in gender with the subject, thus providing no cue for retrieval. In English, although present tense verbs agree in number with the subject, past tense verbs do not, allowing us to test the role of number as a retrieval cue within the same language. Results from both experiments converge, showing similarity-based interference at encoding, and some evidence for an effect at retrieval. After having pointed out the non-negligible role of encoding in sentence comprehension, and noting that Lewis and Vasishth's (2005) ACT-R model of sentence processing, the most fully developed cue-based retrieval approach to sentence processing does not predict encoding effects, we propose an augmentation of this model that predicts these effects. We then also propose a self-organizing sentence processing model (SOSP), which has the advantage of accounting for retrieval and encoding interference with a single mechanism.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sandra Villata
- Psycholinguistics Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Whitney Tabor
- Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, United States
- Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, United States
| | - Julie Franck
- Psycholinguistics Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
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Laurinavichyute A, Jäger LA, Akinina Y, Roß J, Dragoy O. Retrieval and Encoding Interference: Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Anaphor Processing. Front Psychol 2017. [PMID: 28649216 PMCID: PMC5465429 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00965] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
The main goal of this paper was to disentangle encoding and retrieval interference effects in anaphor processing and thus to evaluate the hypothesis predicting that structurally inaccessible nouns (distractors) are not considered to be potential anaphor antecedents during language processing (Nicol and Swinney, 1989). Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted: one in German, comparing gender-unmarked reflexives and gender-marked pronouns, and two in Russian, comparing gender-marked and -unmarked reflexives. In the German experiment, no interference effects were found. In the first experiment in Russian, an unexpected reading times pattern emerged: in the condition where the distractor matched the gender of the reflexive's antecedent, reading of the gender-unmarked, but not the gender-marked reflexives was slowed down. The same reading times pattern was replicated in a second experiment in Russian where the order of the reflexive and the main verb was inverted. We conclude that the results of the two experiments in Russian are inconsistent with the retrieval interference account, but can be explained by encoding interference and additional semantic processing efforts associated with the processing of gender-marked reflexives. In sum, we found no evidence that would allow us to reject the syntax as an early filer account (Nicol and Swinney, 1989).
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Affiliation(s)
- Anna Laurinavichyute
- Neurolinguistics Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsMoscow, Russia.,Department of Linguistics, University of PotsdamPotsdam, Germany
| | - Lena A Jäger
- Department of Linguistics, University of PotsdamPotsdam, Germany
| | - Yulia Akinina
- Neurolinguistics Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsMoscow, Russia.,Graduate School for the Humanities, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
| | - Jennifer Roß
- Speech Therapy Center 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'Berlin, Germany
| | - Olga Dragoy
- Neurolinguistics Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsMoscow, Russia.,Department of Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation, Moscow Research Institute of PsychiatryMoscow, Russia
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Patil U, Vasishth S, Lewis RL. Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English. Front Psychol 2016; 7:329. [PMID: 27303315 PMCID: PMC4881398 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00329] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/05/2015] [Accepted: 02/22/2016] [Indexed: 11/20/2022] Open
Abstract
It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Umesh Patil
- Department of Linguistics, University of PotsdamPotsdam, Germany; Computational Linguistics, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of OsnabrückOsnabrück, Germany
| | - Shravan Vasishth
- Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany
| | - Richard L Lewis
- Department of Psychology, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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He X, Kaiser E. Processing the Chinese Reflexive “ziji”: Effects of Featural Constraints on Anaphor Resolution. Front Psychol 2016; 7:284. [PMID: 27148099 PMCID: PMC4830837 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00284] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/07/2015] [Accepted: 02/14/2016] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
We present three self-paced reading experiments that investigate the reflexive ziji “self” in Chinese—in particular, we tested whether and how person-feature-based blocking guides comprehenders' real-time processing and final interpretation of ziji. Prior work claims that in Chinese sentences like “John thought that {I/you/Bill} did not like ZIJI,” (i) the reflexive ziji can refer to the matrix subject John if the intervening subject is also a third person entity (e.g., Bill), but that (ii) an intervening first or second person pronoun blocks reference to the matrix subject, causing ziji to refer to the first or second person pronoun. However, native speakers' judgments regarding the accessibility of long-distance antecedents are rather unstable, and researchers also disagree on what the exact configurations are that allow blocking. In addition, many open questions persist regarding the real-time processing of reflexives more generally, in particular regarding the accessibility (or lack thereof) of structurally unlicensed antecedents. We conducted three self-paced reading studies where we recorded people's word-by-word reading times and also asked questions that probed their off-line interpretation of the reflexive ziji. People's answers to the off-line questions show that blocking is not absolute: Comprehenders do allow significant numbers of non-local choices in both the first and the second person blocking conditions, albeit in small numbers. At the same time, the reading time data, particularly those from Experiments 2 and 3, show that comprehenders use person feature cues to quickly filter out inaccessible long-distance referents. The difference between on-line and off-line patterns points to the possibility that the interpretation of ziji unfolds over time: it seems that initially, during real-time processing, person-feature cues weigh more heavily and constrain what antecedent candidates get considered, but that at some later point, other kinds of information are also integrated and perhaps outweigh the person-feature constraint, resulting in consideration of referents that were initially “blocked” due to the person-feature constraint. In sum, in addition to the structural constraints identified in prior work, person-featural cues also play a key role in regulating the on-line processing of reflexives in Chinese.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiao He
- ProSearch Strategies, Inc.Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Elsi Kaiser
- Department of Linguistics, University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA, USA
- *Correspondence: Elsi Kaiser
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Koornneef A, Reuland E. On the Shallow Processing (Dis)Advantage: Grammar and Economy. Front Psychol 2016; 7:82. [PMID: 26903897 PMCID: PMC4748861 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00082] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/15/2015] [Accepted: 01/14/2016] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
In the psycholinguistic literature it has been proposed that readers and listeners often adopt a "good-enough" processing strategy in which a "shallow" representation of an utterance driven by (top-down) extra-grammatical processes has a processing advantage over a "deep" (bottom-up) grammatically-driven representation of that same utterance. In the current contribution we claim, both on theoretical and experimental grounds, that this proposal is overly simplistic. Most importantly, in the domain of anaphora there is now an accumulating body of evidence showing that the anaphoric dependencies between (reflexive) pronominals and their antecedents are subject to an economy hierarchy. In this economy hierarchy, deriving anaphoric dependencies by deep-grammatical-operations requires less processing costs than doing so by shallow-extra-grammatical-operations. In addition, in case of ambiguity when both a shallow and a deep derivation are available to the parser, the latter is actually preferred. This, we argue, contradicts the basic assumptions of the shallow-deep dichotomy and, hence, a rethinking of the good-enough processing framework is warranted.
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Affiliation(s)
- Arnout Koornneef
- Brain and Education Lab, Institute for Education and Child Studies, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands
| | - Eric Reuland
- Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS Utrecht, Netherlands
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Harris JA. Structure Modulates Similarity-Based Interference in Sluicing: An Eye Tracking study. Front Psychol 2016; 6:1839. [PMID: 26733893 PMCID: PMC4683205 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01839] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2015] [Accepted: 11/13/2015] [Indexed: 12/02/2022] Open
Abstract
In cue-based content-addressable approaches to memory, a target and its competitors are retrieved in parallel from memory via a fast, associative cue-matching procedure under a severely limited focus of attention. Such a parallel matching procedure could in principle ignore the serial order or hierarchical structure characteristic of linguistic relations. I present an eye tracking while reading experiment that investigates whether the sentential position of a potential antecedent modulates the strength of similarity-based interference, a well-studied effect in which increased similarity in features between a target and its competitors results in slower and less accurate retrieval overall. The manipulation trades on an independently established Locality bias in sluiced structures to associate a wh-remnant (which ones) in clausal ellipsis with the most local correlate (some wines), as in The tourists enjoyed some wines, but I don't know which ones. The findings generally support cue-based parsing models of sentence processing that are subject to similarity-based interference in retrieval, and provide additional support to the growing body of evidence that retrieval is sensitive to both the structural position of a target antecedent and its competitors, and the specificity or diagnosticity of retrieval cues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jesse A Harris
- Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Reali C, Esaulova Y, Öttl A, von Stockhausen L. Role descriptions induce gender mismatch effects in eye movements during reading. Front Psychol 2015; 6:1607. [PMID: 26579003 PMCID: PMC4630541 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01607] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/31/2015] [Accepted: 10/05/2015] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
The present eye-tracking study investigates the effect of gender typicality on the resolution of anaphoric personal pronouns in English. Participants read descriptions of a person performing a typically male, typically female or gender-neutral occupational activity. The description was followed by an anaphoric reference (he or she) which revealed the referent's gender. The first experiment presented roles which were highly typical for men (e.g., blacksmith) or for women (e.g., beautician), the second experiment presented role descriptions with a moderate degree of gender typicality (e.g., psychologist, lawyer). Results revealed a gender mismatch effect in early and late measures in the first experiment and in early stages in the second experiment. Moreover, eye-movement data for highly typical roles correlated with explicit typicality ratings. The results are discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, comparing natural gender languages and grammatical gender languages. An interpretation of the cognitive representation of typicality beliefs is proposed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chiara Reali
- Department of Psychology, University of Duisburg-Essen Essen, Germany
| | - Yulia Esaulova
- Department of Psychology, University of Duisburg-Essen Essen, Germany
| | - Anton Öttl
- Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway
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Parker D, Lago S, Phillips C. Interference in the processing of adjunct control. Front Psychol 2015; 6:1346. [PMID: 26441723 PMCID: PMC4561755 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01346] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/20/2015] [Accepted: 08/21/2015] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Recent research on the memory operations used in language comprehension has revealed a selective profile of interference effects during memory retrieval. Dependencies such as subject-verb agreement show strong facilitatory interference effects from structurally inappropriate but feature-matching distractors, leading to illusions of grammaticality (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Wagers et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). In contrast, dependencies involving reflexive anaphors are generally immune to interference effects (Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). This contrast has led to the proposal that all anaphors that are subject to structural constraints are immune to facilitatory interference. Here we use an animacy manipulation to examine whether adjunct control dependencies, which involve an interpreted anaphoric relation between a null subject and its licensor, are also immune to facilitatory interference effects. Our results show reliable facilitatory interference in the processing of adjunct control dependencies, which challenges the generalization that anaphoric dependencies as a class are immune to such effects. To account for the contrast between adjunct control and reflexive dependencies, we suggest that variability within anaphora could reflect either an inherent primacy of animacy cues in retrieval processes, or differential degrees of match between potential licensors and the retrieval probe.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dan Parker
- Linguistics Program, Department of English, College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA, USA
| | - Sol Lago
- Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA
| | - Colin Phillips
- Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA ; Language Science Center, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA
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