No abstract

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged by Ferreira (2003), who showed that comprehenders sometimes misinterpret unambiguous sentences in which subject and object appear in noncanonical order, such as passives or object-clefts. According to Ferreira, these misinterpretations show that parallel to an algorithmic analysis, the HPM performs a heuristic analysis sometimes resulting in interpretations not licensed by the grammar. Our study investigated whether misinterpretation effects indeed reflect an erroneous mapping of form to meaning due to heuristic processing strategies. Using an experimental design closely following Ferreira (2003), Experiment 1 demonstrates that errors with noncanonical sentences show up in German as well, despite the fact that German provides morphological case, which a heuristic strategy should use. Experiment 2 required participants to judge the plausibility of the same sentences. With this task, no evidence for misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences was found. Taken together, our results suggest that misinterpretation errors do not reflect errors in the mapping of form to meaning, but task-specific difficulties that arise when participants retrieve information from the memory representation of a sentence. Consequently, misinterpretation errors do not provide evidence for the claim that the HPM pursues a heuristic analysis in addition to an algorithmic analysis. Our results instead lend support to models of the HPM that assume algorithmic processing only. (PsycINFO Database Record

This paper presents three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality. In the first two experiments, two different groups of participants judged sentences by the method of magnitude estimation and by the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in a single session. The two experiments involved identical sentence materials but they differed in the order in which the two procedures were applied. The results show a high correlation between the magnitude estimation data and the speeded grammaticality judgments data, both within a session and across the two sessions. The third experiment was a questionnaire study in which participants judged the same sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical without time pressure. This experiment yielded results quite similar to those of the other two experiments. Thus gradient and binary judgments both provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory when assessed in an experimentally controlled way. We present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments. Finally, we compare our experimental results to existing corpus data in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage.

This paper presents a corpus study of the order between subject and object in German main and embedded clauses. Since prior studies have shown that object-subject (OS) sentences are rare in comparison to subject-object (SO) sentences, for both main and embedded clauses two corpora were assembled: One corpus containing both SO and OS sentences, and a second corpus containing only OS sentences. In accordance with prior work, the rate of OS sentences was low, but the construction of a corpus restricted to OS-sentences still allowed a statistical analysis of OS-sentences. For embedded clauses, the main results of the current corpus study are: (i) Accusative objects predominate in SOsentences but dative objects in OS-sentences. (ii) The use of OS order is tied to lexical-semantic properties of verbs and their arguments. OS order occurs mainly when the subject is inanimate and the object animate. The verbs used in OS-sentences are mainly ditransitive verbs in the passive voice and unaccusative verbs. (iii) Weight had no significant effect on order. For main clauses with either subject or object in the prefield somewhat different results were found. Following the presentation of the corpus results, we discuss how they fit into current conceptions of word-order variation.

In German, oblique Cases (dative and genitive) require morphological licensing while structural Cases (nominative and accusative) do not. This difference can be captured by assuming that in German, NPs bearing oblique Case have an extra structural layer Kase phrase (KP) which is missing in NPs bearing structural Case. Focusing on dative NPs, we will show that the postulation of such a phrase-structural difference between oblique and structural case allows for a unified explanation of a wide array of facts both from the domain of grammar and from the domain of language comprehension. First, with regard to grammar, several asymmetries between dative NPs and nominative/accusative NPs follow if the former but not the latter are included within a KP-shell, including asymmetries with respect to function changing operations, clausal licensing, binding and topic drop, among others. Corroborating evidence for our analysis of dative Case in German will be provided by a comparison with data from English and Dutch. Second, when combined with certain independent assumptions about the human sentence parsing mechanism, the postulation of a KP for datives helps explain several recent experimental f'mdings with respect to on-line sentence understanding, including the facts that dative case is dispreferred in situations of local syntactic ambiguity and that dative case may erroneously override structural case during sentence comprehension but not vice versa.The work underlying this article has been supported by a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (Ba-1178/4-1) to the first and second investigator and to Jens-Max Hopf. Part of the results were presented 1998 at a workshop of the Sonderforschungsbereich Theorie des Lexikons at the University of Cologne and at the Workshop on Morphological Case at the University of Utrecht. We wish to thank both audiences for stimulating discussion, especially Denis Bouchard, Lyn Nichols, Albert Ortmann and Dieter Wunderlich. Thanks to Peter Suchsland and Ralf Vogel far clarifying discussion, to Susanne Trissler for a number of suggestions as well as to Frans Hinskens, Henk van Riemsdijk. Manrice Vliegen and Jan-Wouter Zwart for their help with the Dutch data and L~iszl6 Moln~rfi for his help