Anticipating explanations in relative clause processing

Abstract

We show that comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined readers’ expectations for high/low relative clause attachments following implicit-causality and non-implicit-causality verbs (John detests/babysits the children of the musician who…). In the off-line study, the widely reported low-attachment preference for English is observed in the non-implicit causality condition, but this preference gives way to more high attachments in the implicit causality condition in cases in which (i) the verb’s causally implicated referent occupies the high-attachment position and (ii) the relative clause provides an explanation for the event described by the matrix clause (e.g., …who are arrogant and rude). In the on-line study, a similar preference for high attachment emerges in the implicit causality context—crucially, before the occurrence of any linguistic evidence that the RC does in fact provide an explanation—whereas the low-attachment preference is consistent elsewhere. These findings constitute the first demonstration that expectations about ensuing discourse coherence relationships can elicit full reversals in syntactic attachment preferences, and that these discourse-level expectations can affect on-line disambiguation as rapidly as lexical and morphosyntactic cues.

What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension?

“…For example, contextual information can lead to facilitated processing of incoming information at the level of syntactic structure (see previous section, and Arai & Keller, 2013; Farmer, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2006; Garnsey et al, 1997; Gibson & Wu, 2013;Hare et al, 2003; Rohde, Levy, & Kehler, 2011; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995; Wilson & Garnsey, 2009), phonological information (Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998; DeLong et al, 2005) and orthographic information (DeLong et al, 2005;Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkänen, 2010). …”

“…For example, to facilitate semantic processing of new information, comprehenders are able to use information within a verbal context about specific discourse connectives (Rohde & Horton, 2014; Xiang & Kuperberg, 2015), inferential causal relationships (Kuperberg et al, 2011), the selection restrictions of a verb (Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Paczynski & Kuperberg, 2012), the tense of a preceding verb (Altmann & Kamide, 2007), the combination of a specific verb and argument (Kamide et al, 2003; Matsuki et al, 2011; Metusalem et al, 2012; Paczynski & Kuperberg, 2012), pre-verbal arguments (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2009; Kamide et al, 2003), specific prepositions (Chambers et al, 2002), and prosody (Kurumada, Brown, Bibyk, Pontillo, & Tanenhaus, 2014; Snedeker & Yuan, 2008). Similarly, to facilitate the processing of new information at the level of syntactic structure, comprehenders can use information within a verbal context about its referential discourse structure (Gibson & Wu, 2013), discourse coherence relationships (Rohde et al, 2011), thematic relationships between verbs and arguments (Garnsey et al, 1997; Wilson & Garnsey, 2009), the specific sense of a verb (Hare et al, 2003), or even their knowledge about a verb’s phonological typicality (Farmer et al, 2006). There is also evidence that syntactic information within a context can facilitate the processing of orthographic information (Dikker et al, 2010) or even low level perceptual features (Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009).…”

A probabilistic reconciliation of coherence-driven and centering-driven theories of pronoun interpretation

“…(which signals an Occasion relation, which is biased to the Goal). Finally, Rohde, Levy & Kehler (2011) showed that the expectations that object-biased IC verbs create for an ensuing Explanation, along with the next-mention biases toward their direct objects, influence syntactic attachment biases in online relative clause processing.…”

Discourse integration guided by the ‘Question under Discussion’

“…Rohde, Levy, and Kehler (2011) provided experimental evidence that discourse coherence relationships such as Causal and Contiguity relationships play roles in the interpretation and processing of relative clauses, and Rohde & Kehler (2009) explicitly recognized the relation between discourse coherence relationships and QUDs…”