Experimental studies of grammar: Syntactic analysis of ambiguous sentences

Chernova, Daria; Slioussar, Natalia; Prokopenya, Veronika; Petrova, Tatiana; Chernigovskaya, Tatiana V.

doi:10.31857/s0373658x0001065-0

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We believe that comparative sentences were more difficult than two other sentence types with syntax-semantics mapping problems (locative and temporal) because three rather than two items had to be ordered. As for morphosyntactic problems, our results and a series of dedicated experiments in (Chernova, 2015;Chernova et al, 2016;Slioussar et al, 2022) show that several factors contribute to processing complexity: LA is more difficult than HA, retrieving case features is more difficult than number and gender features. Finally, all such examples contain a participial construction, which adds to the syntactic complexity of the sentence.…”

Section: Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 50%

“…4 Another piece of evidence comes from the study reported by Antropova et al (2022) who studied examples with number and case agreement errors on participial modifiers [all sentences discussed in the present paper and in Chernova, 2015, Chernova et al, 2016…”

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 69%

“…These two factors are mentioned in many studies, and Boyle et al (2013) even assess their relative significance in triggering processing difficulties in English speaking children (and confirm that noncanonical word orders are especially difficult to process). In morphologically rich languages, morphosyntax may cause processing problems: for example, Russian speakers often fail to track case features to decide on the syntactic structure of certain constructions (Chernova, 2015;Chernova et al, 2016).…”

Section: Selecting Syntactically Complex Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Russian, some sentences are ambiguous, like (2), while in the others, the attachment site is morphologically disambiguated: by the number or gender of the wh-word heading the relative clause or by the number, gender or case of the participle. 3 Chernova (2015), Chernova et al (2016) studied examples with participial modifiers and showed that readers make a lot of interpretation errors with disambiguation by case: in the sentences like (1) with HA and especially like (3) with LA. These constructions were also included in the sentence comprehension task by Malyutina et al (2018).…”

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Response options: A) the millionaire; B) the heir From Chernova (2015); Chernova et al (2016) and from further research by Slioussar et al (2022) we know that error rates are much lower in the examples disambiguated by number-and gender-specific endings. We also know that while the readers eventually prefer HA (making fewer interpretation errors in unambiguous HA sentences and selecting HA interpretations more often in ambiguous ones), LA is easier to process online, i.e., unambiguous LA sentences are read faster than HA ones.…”

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence

Chernova¹,

Novozhilov²,

Slioussar

2023

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-by-word reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test.

show abstract

Section: Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 50%

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Selecting Syntactically Complex Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Types I and Ii: Sentences With High And Low Attachment Of A ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence

Chernova¹,

Novozhilov²,

Slioussar

2023

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Just Syntax?

Birzer

Mayer

2023

Zeitschrift Für Slawistik

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary According to the norms of the contemporary Russian standard language, the covert first argument of the adverbial participle (AP) has to be co-referential with the first argument of its matrix verb. However, other co-reference choices are a frequent phenomenon, as numerous publications both descriptive (Rappaport 1984; Jokojama 1984) and prescriptive (Ickovič 1982; Glovinskaja 2000) testify. Since the reasons for these divergent co-reference choices have been insufficiently addressed so far, we conducted an experiment that tested the influence of linguistic and sociodemographic factors on the co-reference choices. The linguistic factors tested are sentence semantics, argument structure of the verb and linear syntactic order of adverbial participle and matrix clause. Since the adverbial participle has been subject to an intensive normativization process, we assume that the degree of the respondents’ familiarity with prescriptive language rules and the degree of their exposition to texts reflecting these rules influence respondents’ co-reference choices. Therefore, we also tested for sociodemographic factors reflecting these degrees, namely the status of Russian as primary or secondary language, age, gender and highest level of education attained. Our data suggest a contrast between actual language use, in which the co-referential ambiguity of APs is resolved by verb and sentence semantics and the syntactic position of the AP, and the normative rules of Russian grammaticography, which allow only for co-reference with the first argument of the matrix clause. Long-lasting exposure to highly normatized text registers show effect, as respondents with master’s degree or even higher levels of education significantly prefer co-reference with the first argument of the matrix clause even in ambiguous contexts. The paper is structured as follows: The first section gives a survey of the divergent co-reference choices discussed in the literature and identifies linguistic factors hypothesized to influence a speaker’s choice. Section 2 discusses possible sociolinguistic factors affecting the co-reference choice. How these two types of factors are considered in the design of our experiment as well as participant sampling is described in section 3. In section 4 we apply logistic regression to our data and discuss its results, to be followed by the conclusions in section 5.

show abstract

Prerequisites for the Development of Psycholinguistics in Europe (Analysis of the Works of German Scientists Anton Marty and Karl Buhler)

Mousavi

2024

PoS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Experimental studies of grammar: Syntactic analysis of ambiguous sentences

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence

Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence

Just Syntax?

Prerequisites for the Development of Psycholinguistics in Europe (Analysis of the Works of German Scientists Anton Marty and Karl Buhler)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About