The comprehension of anomalous sentences: Evidence from structural priming

Ivanova, Iva; Pickering, Martin J.; Branigan, Holly P.; McLean, Janet F.; Costa, Albert

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.013

Cited by 39 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Also, because it occurs between comprehension and production, structural priming has been used to investigate comprehension processes (Christianson, Luke, & Ferreira, 2010;Ivanova, Pickering, Branigan, McLean, & Costa, 2012;van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Jacob, 2006).…”

Section: Processing Verb-phrase Ellipsis 813mentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing verb-phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the syntactic account

Cai

Pickering

Sturt

2013

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Theories differ as to how people recover the meaning of verb-phrase (VP) ellipsis. According to the syntactic account, people reproduce the syntactic structure of the antecedent during the processing of VP ellipsis. This account thus predicts that the ellipsis site contains syntactic information. Using the structural priming paradigm, we found that, in Mandarin, an ellipsis prime (a double-object or prepositional-object dative antecedent plus a VP ellipsis) was less effective in priming than a full-form prime sentence (the same antecedent plus the full-form equivalent of the VP ellipsis) but behaved similarly to a baseline prime (the same antecedent plus a neutral sentence). The result thus suggests that syntactic structure is not reproduced at the ellipsis site and supports the semantic account in which VP ellipsis is interpreted via a semantic representation. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

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Section: Processing Verb-phrase Ellipsis 813mentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing verb-phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the syntactic account

Cai

Pickering

Sturt

2013

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…Structural priming has been observed for different constructions and languages (e.g., Cai, Pickering, Yan, & Branigan, 2011; Salamoura & Williams, 2006; Scheepers, 2003; Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007), and in natural speech as well as experiments (Gries, 2005; Jaeger & Snider, 2013; Szmrecsanyi, 2005; see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review). Most relevantly, structural priming has already been used to study well-formed sentences involving missing elements (Cai, Pickering, & Sturt, 2013), as well as the processing of anomalous sentences (Ivanova, Pickering, Branigan, McLean, & Costa, 2012; Slevc & Momma, 2015). …”

Section: Structural Priming From Anomalous Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both experiments in our study were disguised as a game involving communication via an automatic speech transcriber (Ivanova et al, 2012). Participants were told that their oral descriptions would appear as text on their (imaginary) partner’s screen and their partner’s oral descriptions would appear as text on their own screen.…”

Section: Structural Priming From Anomalous Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

Ivanova

Branigan

McLean

et al. 2016

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.

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“…For this reason, our results for Basque can be said to make manifest the activation of a repair strategy (Frazier and Clifton, 2011; Phillips et al, 2011; Gibson et al, 2013; Beltrama and Xiang, 2016, and others) and a structural/syntactic priming (Ivanova et al, 2012) that turns a syntactically ungrammatical sentence into a well-formed input where the NDE (a non-negative polarity item in this case) appears to be licensed despite the absence of any overt c-commanding licensor in the syntactic structure (Vasishth et al, 2008). In grammatical terms, in the absence of an overt negative marker ez , a null operator NEG, as a last resort option (Zeijlstra, 2004), might be postulated at the syntactic representation of these sentences in order to account for the 31.5% of items that are still considered acceptable but are given a SN reading 83.96% of the time on average (see Table 2 in Appendix 3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…Also relevant are the series of studies that focus on the perception and comprehension of sequences containing grammatical illusions (such as illusory NPI licensing, Phillips et al, 2011; and comparative illusions, Wellwood et al, 2017). Some of these studies even focus on the ability of adults to learn to comprehend a novel syntactic construction that in strict syntactic terms is ungrammatical (such as the so-called ‘needs’ construction, Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004), a task in which structural and, more specifically, syntactic priming has been claimed to play an important role (Ivanova et al, 2012). Nonetheless, in contrast to the interest aroused by this question in psycholinguistic approaches, in linguistic theory construction the study of the interpretation of ungrammatical and unacceptable sentences is not routinely taken into account.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Etxeberria¹,

Tubau

Déprez

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult’s grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

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The comprehension of anomalous sentences: Evidence from structural priming

Cited by 39 publications

References 61 publications

Processing verb-phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the syntactic account

Processing verb-phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the syntactic account

Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

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