Avoiding attachment ambiguities: The role of constituent ordering

Abstract

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PPattachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to Mary''). A preference judgment experiment confirmed that comprehenders prefer the latter orders for dative utterances when the former order would have contained an ambiguity. Nevertheless, speakers in two on-line production experiments showed no evidence of an ambiguity avoidance strategy. In fact, they were slightly more likely to use the former order when it was ambiguous than when it was not. Speakers' failure to disambiguate with ordering cannot be explained by the use of other ambiguity mechanisms, like prosody. A prosodic analysis of the responses in Experiment 3 showed that while speakers generally produced prosodic patterns that were consistent with the syntactic structure, these patterns would not strongly disambiguate the PP-attachment ambiguity. We suggest that speakers do not consistently disambiguate local PP-attachment ambiguities of this type, and in particular do not use constituent ordering for this purpose. Instead, constituent ordering is driven by factors like syntactic weight and lexical bias, which may be internal to the production system.

Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning

“…Using this method, evidence was provided that communicators have rapid access to common ground information and can use perspective cues to accurately infer privileged information from a speaker. Keysar et al (2003) Ferreira & Dell, 2000;Arnold,Wasow, Asudeh, & Alrenga, 2004). Only one of these studies examined the progressive temporal nature of perspective switches (Hanna et al, 2003), although this study did not directly test whether knowledge of another personÕs beliefs can lead to assumptions on predicting othersÕ behaviour.…”

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

“…These same contingencies also appear to shape sentence planning. For example, in language production, the frequencies with which verbs appear in alternative syntactic contexts has consequences for sentence production choices of sentences containing those verbs (Arnold, Wasow, Asudeh & Alrenga, 2004;Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010;Stallings et al, 1998) as do the distributional pairings between noun animacy and sentence structure (Bresnan & Ford, 2010;Reali & Christiansen, 2007;Gennari & MacDonald, 2009). Like comprehenders, language producers implicitly learn statistical patterns of their linguistic environment, and this information affects production choices and accuracy (Boyd & Goldberg, 2011;Chang, 2009;Dell, Reed, Adams & Meyer, 2000;Warker & Dell, 2006).…”

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

“…In the last decades, linguistics has come to accept that processing constraints play a role in word order preferences (Chomsky, 1995;Dryer, 1980Dryer, , 1992Hawkins, 1983Hawkins, , 1994Wasow, 2002), thus converging with psycholinguistic models that have tackled the question of how processing demands impact on sentence word order variations (Arnold, Wasow, Asudeh, & Alrega, 2004;Bock, 1982;Bock & Levelt, 1994;Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, & Baayen, 2007;Ferreira & Dell, 2000;Gibson, 1998; among others), including accounts based on information theoretic considerations (Gibson, Piantadosi, Brink, Bergen, Lim, & Saxe, 2013;Maurits, Perfors, & Navarro, 2010, inter alia). Thus, there is general agreement that sentence word order is modulated by factors external to the grammar, although there are differing views on the specifics of this interaction.…”