Resolving number ambiguities during language comprehension

Bader, Markus; Häussler, Jana

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.05.005

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Once the reader gets to the disambiguation point, the object relative interpretation requires no revision of the initial commitment. The subject relative interpretation, on the other hand, requires a revision of the earlier parse, and such a revision is associated with higher processing costs (see Duffy et al 1988, Bader andHäussler 2009 for a discussion of such costs and the processing models associated with them).…”

Section: Figure 3 Herementioning

confidence: 99%

Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan

Clemens

Coon

Pedro

et al. 2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Researchers using different methods have converged on the result that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Cross-linguistic evidence for the subject processing advantage (SPA) has come mostly from accusative languages, where the covariance of grammatical function and case prevents researchers from determining which of these two factors underlies the SPA. Languages with morphological ergativity allow for the separation of case and grammatical function, since the subject position is associated with two cases: absolutive (intransitive subjects) and ergative (transitive subjects). Prior experimental results on the processing of ergative languages suggest that grammatical function and surface case may be equally important in relative clause processing. On the one hand, as a syntactic subject, the ergative DP has a processing advantage over the absolutive object. On the other hand, the appearance of an ergative serves as a cue for the projection of the absolutive object, which gives processing preference to that object. This paper further tests these findings by examining the processing of relative clauses in Ch'ol and Q'anjob'al, two languages that mark ergativity via agreement on the predicate (head-marking). We address two main questions: (a) does the SPA hold in ergative languages? and (b) are case and agreement equally able to license grammatical functions, and if so, is this reflected in processing? With regard to (a), our results support the SPA, suggesting that it is present in both ergative and accusative languages. With respect to (b), we do not find evidence for a cueing effect associated with the ergative agreement marker. We conclude that dependent-marking is superior to head-marking in tracking grammatical function; in the absence of case cues, universal structural preferences such as the SPA become more pronounced. We also consider and reject a processing explanation for syntactic ergativity, according to which some languages categorically avoid A-bar movement of the ergative with a gap because it imposes a heavy processing load. Our results show that the processing of ergative gaps is not associated with greater cost than the processing of absolutive object gaps; this suggests that an explanation for syntactic ergativity should be sought outside processing.

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Section: Figure 3 Herementioning

confidence: 99%

Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan

Clemens

Coon

Pedro

et al. 2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…Fourth, the region most commonly associated with morphosyntactic processing in general and of grammatical number in particular is Brocaʼs area (e.g., Carreiras et al, 2010) and not the angular gyrus. Fifth, although plural nouns are generally less frequent than singular nouns (e.g., Bader & Häussler, 2009), this is unlikely to be the cause of additional activation for plural nouns in this study, as target words were matched for word form frequency. Moreover, activation in the left angular gyrus was not modulated by word form frequency in our post hoc analysis.…”

Section: Processing Of Plural Versus Singular Count Nounsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Where the Mass Counts: Common Cortical Activation for Different Kinds of Nonsingularity

Domahs

Nagels

Domahs

et al. 2012

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Typically, plural nouns are morphosyntactically marked for the number feature, whereas mass nouns are morphosyntactically singular. However, both plural count nouns and mass nouns can be semantically interpreted as nonsingular. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that their commonality in semantic interpretation may lead to common cortical activation for these different kinds of nonsingularity. To this end, we examined brain activation patterns related to three types of nouns while participants were listening to a narrative. Processing of plural compared with singular nouns was related to increased activation in the left angular gyrus. Processing of mass nouns compared with singular count nouns was related to increased activity bilaterally in the superior temporal cortex and also in the left angular gyrus. No significant activation was observed in the direct comparison between plural and mass nouns. We conclude that the left angular gyrus, also known to be relevant for numerical cognition, is involved in the semantic interpretation of different kinds of nonsingularity.

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“…The experiment was implemented on Ibex Farm (Drummond, 2013). Sentences were presented word-by-word at a rate of 225 ms plus 25 ms for each character in a word to account for word length differences (Bader & Häussler, 2009). After each sentence, participants had three seconds to indicate via button press whether the sentence was acceptable ("1" for unacceptable, "7" for acceptable).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

Schwab¹

2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German jemals 'ever', but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI so recht 'really'. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion, and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion.

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Resolving number ambiguities during language comprehension

Cited by 8 publications

References 26 publications

Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan

Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan

Where the Mass Counts: Common Cortical Activation for Different Kinds of Nonsingularity

Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

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