Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

Abstract

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: Partialcue matches-which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference-can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

Multiple dependencies and the role of the grammar in real-time comprehension

“…A number of instances have been documented in which the comprehender appears to entertain relationships excluded by the grammar: for example, in the licensing of subject-verb agreement (Pearlmutter, Garnsey & Bock 1999), case dependencies (Meng & Bader 2000), and negative polarity items (Vasishth, Brü ssow, Lewis & Drenhaus 2008). This grammatical fallibility does appear selective, however, affecting only certain category configurations and feature values.…”

Spotting, collecting and documenting negative polarity items

“…e.g. Drenhaus et al 2004;Saddy et al 2004;Vasishth et al 2006) seem to be very promising ways to get insights about subclasses of NPIs and their interaction. A further refinement of our Spotting algorithm may be done by using a corpus which is word-sense tagged or which contains Information about different word uses (cf.…”

Towards dynamical system models of language-related brain potentials

“…The remaining step of implementing these models would be important to provide continuous-time dynamical models (Vosse and Kempen 2000;van der Velde and de Kamps 2006;Wennekers et al 2006;Garagnani et al 2007). Such models are also required for predicting latencies of ERP components and to bridge the gap to other dependent measures such as reading times and eye movements (Lewis and Vasishth 2006;Vasishth and Lewis 2006a;Vasishth et al 2008;Boston et al in press).…”

“…The model has been applied to several different published reading experiments involving English (Lewis and Vasishth 2006), German (Vasishth et al 2008), and Hindi (Vasishth and Lewis 2006a), using the selfpaced reading and eyetracking methodologies. The simulations provide detailed accounts of the effects of length and structural interference on both unambiguous and garden path structures.…”