Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation

Bock, J. Kathryn; Warren, Richard

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(85)90023-x

Cited by 332 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Accessibility may depend, for example, on a referent's perceptual salience and can be enhanced by exogenous, attentiongrabbing cues (Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007;Ibbotson, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2013;Myachykov & Tomlin 2008;Tomlin, 1995Tomlin, , 1997. Referents can also differ in conceptual accessibility, including features such as imageability (Bock & Warren, 1985), givenness (Arnold, Wasow, Losongco, & Ginstrom, 2000) and animacy (Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992). Assigning perceptually and conceptually accessible referents to subject position instead of less accessible referents is compatible with the hypothesis that easy-to-name referents are encoded with priority.…”

Section: Linear Incrementalitymentioning

confidence: 56%

“…This suggests that sentence formulation in English can indeed begin with priority encoding of as little as a single referent both conceptually and linguistically. However, if we confine ourselves to English or other subject-initial languages, it is often unclear whether accessibility influences linear word order directly or whether it primarily influences subject assignment (Bock & Warren, 1985;McDonald et al, 1993), and thus only indirectly word order. A strong or 'radical' version of linear incrementality (Gleitman et al, 2007) would hold that accessibility directly drives lexical encoding and that subject assignment follows from an early choice to encode one message element linguistically before a different element (e.g., woman before chicken).…”

Section: Linear Incrementalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

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Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

Norcliffe

Konopka

Brown

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation

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Section: Linear Incrementalitymentioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Linear Incrementalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

Norcliffe

Konopka

Brown

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…We suggest that this is because the choice of SO vs. OS order in sentence production is primarily determined by conceptual factors at earlier stages of sentence production (Bock et al, 1985;Tanaka et al, 2011) without regard to the overall computational load, which is also strongly affected by processes in subsequent stages such as the construction of syntactic structures. In particular, we agree with Kubo et al (2012) that similarity-based competition is the key factor here.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Hence, it remains unclear whether the preference for SO is a reflection of word order in individual languages or more universal human cognitive features. What we refer to as individual grammar theory in this paper posits that a language's syntactically determined basic word order has a low processing load in comparison with other possible word orders (e.g., Gibson, 2000), whereas what may be referred to as universal cognition theory hypothesizes that SO word order has a low processing load regardless of the basic word order of any individual language (e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985). To verify which of these two theories is correct, it is necessary to examine languages in which the object precedes the subject in syntactically basic word orders (i.e., OS languages), for which the two theories develop different predictions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Effect of Animacy on Word Order Processing in Kaqchikel Maya

Kiyama¹,

Tamaoka²,

Kim³

et al. 2013

OJML

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This study investigated the processing load of transitive sentences in two different basic word orders (i.e., VOS and SVO) in Kaqchikel Maya, with a particular focus on the animacy of the object. The results of a sentence plausibility judgment task showed that VOS sentences were processed faster than SVO sentences regardless of the animacy of the object. This supports the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that, although SVO is the most frequently used word order, the syntactically determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the results suggest that the processing load in Kaqchikel sentence comprehension is more strongly affected by syntactic canonicity than production frequency or object animacy.Keywords: Animacy; Sentence Processing; SO Word Order Preference; Syntax; Kaqchikel IntroductionAccording to experimental findings from languages such as Basque, English, Finnish, German, and Japanese, sentences in which the subject (S) precedes the object (O) (SO word order = SOV, SVO, VSO) induce a lower processing load for comprehension than those in which the opposite occurs (OS word order = OSV, OVS, VOS), and thus, they are preferred by speakers (Bader & Meng, 1999;Erdocia et al., 2009;Kaiser & Trueswell, 2004;Mazuka, Itoh, & Kondo, 2002;Sekerina, 1997;Tamaoka et al., 2005;Tamaoka et al., 2013; among many others). However, these previous studies on sentence processing have all targeted languages in which the subject precedes the object in syntactically basic word orders (i.e., SO languages). Hence, it remains unclear whether the preference for SO is a reflection of word order in individual languages or more universal human cognitive features. What we refer to as individual grammar theory in this paper posits that a language's syntactically determined basic word order has a low processing load in comparison with other possible word orders (e.g., Gibson, 2000), whereas what may be referred to as universal cognition theory hypothesizes that SO word order has a low processing load regardless of the basic word order of any individual language (e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985). To verify which of these two theories is correct, it is necessary to examine languages in which the object precedes the subject in syntactically basic word orders (i.e., OS languages), for which the two theories develop different predictions. Koizumi et al. (under review) conducted a sentence-processing experiment in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. The syntactically determined basic word order of Kaqchikel is VOS, although in general, word order is relatively flexible (García Matzar & Rodríguez Guaján, 1997: p. 333).They found that VOS was processed faster than the two other commonly used word orders, VSO and SVO. This suggests that the preference for SO in sentence comprehension is not universal; rather, syntactic features of individual languages significantly influence sentence processing load. In other words, the individual grammar theory, rather than the universal cog...

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“…The alternative and more reasonable explanation was that the animacy effect at the initial argument arose from the difference in salience or lexic-semantic accessibility of animate and inanimate entities. Bock and colleagues suggested that animacy is one of the factors that affect how easily conceptual information is retrieved from memory (Bock & Warren, 1985). The inanimate nouns were less accessible and were therefore retrieved with more difficultly than animate nouns (Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008).…”

Section: The Effect O F Noun Animacy At the Sentence-initial Argumentmentioning

confidence: 98%

Two-stage interaction between word order and noun animacy during online thematic processing of sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Zhao

Zheng

et al. 2014

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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How different sources of linguistic information are used during online language comprehension is a central question in psycholinguistic research. This study used eye-tracking and electrophysiological techniques to investigate how and when word order and noun animacy interact with each other during online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences. The initial argument in the sentence is animate or inanimate and the following verb disambiguates it as an agent or patient. The results at the verb revealed that, at the early processing stage, the patient-first sentences elicited longer gaze duration and larger N400 than the agent-first ones only when the initial argument was inanimate; however, at the late stage, the patient-first sentences elicited prolonged second-pass time and enhanced P600 only when the initial argument was animate. In addition, the brain oscillations at the verb also showed different patterns in the early and later window latencies. The present results suggested that the online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences involves not only universal processing strategies (subject-preference) but also language-specific strategies as well. That is, in Mandarin Chinese, noun animacy interacts with word order immediately during online sentence comprehension; the initial processing results can be overridden by additional interpretively relevant information types at a later stage. Those results provided important indications for the language comprehension models.Human language comprehension requires the timely coordination of grammatical/syntactic and semantic cues from the linguistic input. How the different sources of information are used " online" has been a central question in language comprehension. Although lots of studies have investigated the interaction between semantic and syn tactic information, they were primarily concerned with the general comprehension processes. One important aspect of the language comprehension process involves assigning thematic roles to sentence arguments (i.e., whether an argument is the actor or the undergoer of the event being described). How and when the different sources of linguistic information are used during the process of argument interpretation is still not completely clear.Theories of language comprehension differ in their predictions of when the processing system integrates the different sources of information. The modular models (e.g. Friederici, 2002) predict that syntactic and semantic information are processed in parallel and independent of one another. It is only at a later stage that the different types of linguistic information are integrated. The inter active models (e.g. Hagoort, 2005), however, predict that different information types can be used immediately to co-determine the interpretation of linguistic expressions when they become available. The extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM;Bomkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006) assumes that, at the relatively early stage, morphosyntactic cues and prominence cues are considered collectively ...

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Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation

Cited by 332 publications

References 28 publications

Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

Effect of Animacy on Word Order Processing in Kaqchikel Maya

Two-stage interaction between word order and noun animacy during online thematic processing of sentences in Mandarin Chinese

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