Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue

Branigan, Holly P.; Pickering, Martin J.; Cleland, Alexandra A.

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(99)00081-5

Cited by 632 publications

(628 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…It is the presence of a garden path effect on the disambiguating region of the critical sentences in both experiments that establishes this point. More generally, both the present study and the related studies discussed above may be seen as confirming the well-established point from the literature on structural priming in language production (e.g., Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000) that language users retain abstract syntactic structures in a robust form of memory representation, even on the basis of brief exposure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

Staub

2007

Journal of Memory and Language

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Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical conditions were designed to induce readers to construct the ultimately correct analysis just prior to being garden-pathed by the incorrect analysis. In both experiments, the earliest measures of the garden path effect were not modulated by this manipulation. However, there was significantly less regressive re-reading of the sentence in those conditions in which the correct analysis was likely to have been constructed, then abandoned, at an earlier point. These results suggest that a syntactic analysis that is abandoned in the course of processing a sentence is not lost altogether, and can be re-activated or retrieved from memory. Implications for models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

Staub

2007

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Garrod et al, 2007;2010). The effect of reciprocal interaction on the regularization of unpredictable variation is currently unknown, although one possibility is that regularization might actually occur more quickly due to alignment during interaction (Branigan, Pickering & Cleland, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

2010

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Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in simple diffusion chains of adults. An iterated artificial language learning methodology was used, in which participants were organized into diffusion chains: the first individual in each chain was exposed to an artificial language which exhibited unpredictability in plural marking, and subsequent learners were exposed to the language produced by the previous learner in their chain. Diffusion chains, but not isolate learners, were found to cumulatively increase predictability of plural marking by lexicalising the choice of plural marker. This suggests that such gradual, cumulative population-level processes offer a possible explanation for regularity in language.

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“…when speaking and listening) [8 -10]; and, (ii) Priming of representations between speakers and listeners [11]. Parity of primed representations leads to imitation, and imitation leads to alignment of those representations between interlocutors.…”

Section: Problems Posed By Dialoguementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interlocutors start to refer to particular objects using the same referring expressions (which gradually become shorter), but they tend to be modified if the interlocutor changes [24]. Syntactic alignment also occurs in dialogue, with speakers repeating the syntactic structure used by their interlocutors for cards describing events [11] (e.g. 'the diver giving the cake to the cricketer ') or objects [31], and repeating syntax or closed-class lexical items in question-answering [32].…”

Section: Box 2 Evidence For Alignment In Dialoguementioning

confidence: 99%