Contrasting Grammatical and Lexical Determiners

Abstract

This paper investigates the difference between the production of grammatical determiners and lexical determiners in the production of adjective-noun phrases (NPs) in Danish. Models of sentence processing (Garrett in Psychology of learning and motivation, Academic press, New York, pp 133-177, 1975; Bock in J Mem Lang 26(2):119-137, 1987) suggest that the phonological encoding stage of grammatical items can only be specified once lexical items have been phonologically encoded. In their usage-based linguistic theory of the grammar-lexicon distinction, Boye and Harder (Lang 88(1):1-44, 2012) propose that this later encoding of grammatical elements is motivated by two specific features of grammatical elements. The first feature, dependence, is that grammatical items (morphemes, words, constructions) cannot be produced in isolation, but are always dependent on a lexical host item. This feature entails a more complex processing which might lead to longer reaction times when comparing the production of NPs with a grammatical determiner to a lexical one. Additionally, a more complex processing might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the grammatical condition relative to the lexical one. The second feature, low prominence, is that grammatical items code background information and therefore cannot convey the main point of a linguistic message. Less focus on grammatical elements might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the production of grammatical elements relative to lexical ones. Those predictions were tested in a task comparing the production of Danish grammatical determiners (indefinite articles) with the production of lexical ones (numerals, which are homonymous with the articles except for a stress difference) in similar contexts. Group-based analyses were performed in order to take inter-individual differences into account. The results show that the two features as proposed by Boye and Harder (2012) are only revealed for the fastest speakers group but not the slower ones.

The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca’s aphasia

“…The definition of grammatical items as dependent on a host item entails the hypothesis that the production of these items is more complicated than the production of lexical items, as reflected in response times and accuracy measures. This hypothesis was confirmed in studies of the production of verbs and determiners (Lange, Messerschmidt, Harder, Siebner & Boye, 2017;Lange, Messerschmidt & Boye, 2018;Ishkhanyan, Boye & Mogensen, 2018;cf. Section 4.1).…”

“…However, they differ with respect to frequency. Lange et al (2018) found that the article en/et is significantly more frequent than the numeral en/et in a large Danish language corpus. 2 Therefore, if there is any frequency effect, it should be to the advantage of the article, and thus run counter to our hypothesis.…”

“…As discussed in Lange et al (2018), the tasks employed to elicit articles and numerals are not completely identical with regards to semantic processing, and this might be a confounding variable. In the grammatical condition, the task revolves around the contrast in colour, while the task in the lexical condition is centred around a number contrast.…”

“…The order of the items was fully randomised, meaning that no participants saw the items in the same order. The design described above was originally developed to test healthy participants (Lange et al, 2018;Ishkhanyan et al, 2018; see Section 4.1 for a summary of the results of these studies).…”

“…The studies from which the production test of the present study was adopted and adjusted provide independent evidence for an extra processing load of grammatical items. Lange et al (2018) applied the test to NBD persons. They found that in the fastest half of the participants, 3 production of grammatical indefinite articles was associated with longer reaction times and lower accuracy rates than production of lexical numerals.…”