Parsing for Position

Abstract

Abstract. Monitoring tasks have long been employed in psycholinguistics, and the end-of-clause effect is possibly the better-known result of using this technique in the study of parsing. Recent results with the tone-monitoring task suggest that tone position modulates cognitive load, as reflected in reaction times (RTs): the earlier the tone appears in a sentence, the longer the RTs. In this study, we show that verb position is also an important factor. In particular, changing the time/location at which verb–noun(s) dependencies are computed during the processing of a sentence has a clear effect on cognitive load and, as a result, on the resources that can be devoted to monitoring and responding to a tone. This study is based on two pieces of evidence. We first report the acceptability ratings of six word orders in Spanish and then present monitoring data with three of these different word orders. Our results suggest that RTs tend to be longer if the verb is yet to be processed, pointing to the centrality of a sentence’s main verb in parsing in general.

Unsaid Thoughts: Thinking in the absence of (some) verbal logical connectives

“…Given that the present study was centred on the semantic and logical properties of compound sentences and the core objective was to probe the availability of the unlexicalised connective NAND, a number of issues required special attention. First of all, we used experimental materials that minimised some of the pragmatic effects that sometimes arise when interpreting such sentences, in line with a framework employed before to this effect (42). This was potentially a factor in Experiment 1, where we used disjunctive sentences as the experimental condition and such sentences tend to elicit an exclusivity implicature, thereby countenancing the inclusive interpretation of disjunction.…”

“…Regarding the eye-movement data, participants were expected to eventually zero in on what might well be regarded as the default meanings of disjunctive and NAND sentences, notwithstanding the fluctuations that were likely to occur during each time-series, as the truth tables of both disjunction and NAND contain three true combinations. Thus, in the case of disjunction we expected participants to converge to the TT reading, following data from previous studies (11), even if overall attention was anticipated to be divided between the TT reading and the mixed forms TF and FT during and immediately after the sentences were played, as per the expectation that the exclusive reading of disjunction is quite prominent in communication. As for NAND, we hypothesised that the preferred reading would be the FF interpretation, possibly the core meaning of a connective that is effectively the negation, or contrary, of and, though the mixed forms TF and FT would need to be considered too if NAND sentences are fully understood and indeed interpreted logically.…”

“…To be more precise, the consensus is based on the contingency that for the most part pragmatic effects can be nullified in various ways, thereby unearthing the logical meaning of the applicable compound sentences. Among other ways, pragmatic effects can be cancelled by the context or the addition of further linguistic material (9), they can be blocked by specific syntactic configurations (10), and some of them can even be controlled for in an experimental setting (11), the latter the approach we used in this study (see Supplementary Materials).…”

“…), only two coordinators behave like logic's connectives. That is, of the sixteen possible logical connectives, only two have been unambiguously lexicalised in the world's languages: the aforementioned conjunction and and (inclusive) disjunction or (18), resulting in the relevant types of logical compound sentences, conjunctive and disjunctive sentences (we put to one side the issue of cross-linguistic variability in order to simplify matters, but in any case our discussion is uncontroversially true of the language of the experiments (11)). This is not to say that natural languages lack the resources to express or describe the possible state of affairs that the sixteen logical connectives can account for; indeed, the truth tables of non-verbalised connectives can be derived analytically through the combination of and, or, and negation, a fact of language as much as of formal logic (19), though this would often produce rather convoluted sentences.…”

“…Firstly, the methodology and analyses we employed allowed us to probe the semantics of language's logical connectives in a more direct manner than has been the case before. Our approach was not centred on analysing the responses of a forced choice task (11,14), nor did it involve evaluating which predictors are significant at specific (and short) time windows of an eye-movement record (31), without explicitly linking up these two sets of data. Instead, we tracked the full time-course of participants' eye movements as they processed the sentences against a background of four potentially relevant scenes by using a GAMM to analyse these data, thereby establishing when exactly differences among the four readings arise.…”