Hyper-active gap filling

Abstract

Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information.

Prediction as memory retrieval: timing and mechanisms

“…Boston, Hale, Patil, Kliegl, & Vasishth, 2008;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009;Hale, 2001;Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phillips, 2006;Levy, 2008;Smith & Levy, 2013;Staub & Clifton, 2006) and other syntactic properties (e.g. Ilkin & Sturt, 2011;Omaki et al, 2015) of upcoming words. In our experiments, the target word is always preceded by a syntactically constraining context, and so participants should be able to quickly anticipate that the next word is likely to be a verb across all conditions.…”

The temporal dynamics of structure and content in sentence comprehension: Evidence from fMRI‐constrained MEG

“…A critical test for such hypotheses is the relative timing of activation across the course of a sentence. In particular, a substantial body of research has found that syntactic processing can be highly predictive (Levy & Keller, ; Omaki et al, ; Staub & Clifton, ; Sturt & Lombardo, ). If the IFG and the PTL are involved in lexical–syntactic processing, they might show early effects of structure.…”

Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction

“…Previous research using different experimental techniques has demonstrated that comprehenders can use various sources of information to compute thematic relations predictively (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Aoshima, Phillips, & Weinberg, 2004;Ferretti, McRae, & Hatherell, 2001;Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003;Knoeferle, Crocker, Scheepers, & Pickering, 2005;McRae, Hare, Elman, & Ferretti, 2005;Omaki et al, 2015). For example, McRae et al (2005) reported that participants were faster to name a verb when it was preceded by a noun that was a typical event participant (e.g., agent, patient) and suggested that comprehenders can use nouns to pre-activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role (see also Hare, Jones, Thomson, Kelly, & McRae, 2009).…”

“…For example, listeners are more likely to direct their eye-gaze to a picture of an edible object (e.g., a cake) when they hear the beginning of an utterance like 'The boy will eat…' compared to a neutral utterance such as 'The boy will move…' (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). Further, much evidence has suggested that comprehenders compute rich expectations about upcoming inputs at multiple levels of representation (syntactic: Ilkin & Sturt, 2011;Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phillips, 2006;Levy, Fedorenko, Breen, & Gibson, 2012;Omaki et al, 2015;Staub & Clifton, 2006;Wicha et al, 2004;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Yoshida, Dickey, & Sturt, 2013;lexico-semantic: Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Kutas & Hillyard, 1984;Otten & Van Berkum, 2008;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013; phonological and orthographic: Delong et al, 2005;Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkanen, 2010;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009;Farmer, Yan, Bicknell, & Tanenhaus, 2015;Kim & Lai, 2012;Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009). Here, we operationally define 'prediction' as the pre-activation of stored representations before the bottom-up input is encountered, and we will make no a priori assumptions regarding the nature of the mechanisms involved (e.g., whether they are automatic or controlled).…”