The effect of syntactic constraints on the processing of backwards anaphora

Kazanina, Nina; Lau, Ellen; Lieberman, Moti; Yoshida, Minoru; Phillips, Colin

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.09.003

Cited by 102 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(68 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

113

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…These differences are all related to the fact that Principle B primarily constrains forward anaphora, whereas Principle C primarily constrains backward anaphora. In backward anaphora contexts, a pronoun precedes its antecedent, and encountering a pronoun initiates an active search for a suitable antecedent (Kazanina et al 2007). During this search, the parser is able to consider potential antecedents one at a time as they appear in the input, with no need to retrieve antecedents from memory.…”

Section: Principle B Versus Principle Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

et al. 2009

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children have repeatedly been found to exhibit Principle B violations, with some reports that these violations occur only with nonquantified antecedents. This quantificational asymmetry (QA) in the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE) has been taken as support for a theory that restricts the scope of binding theory to bound variable anaphora (Reinhart 1983). However, the QA has been challenged, on the basis of discrepant findings and methodological concerns (Elbourne 2005). Here, we resolve the status of the QA with 3 studies and a review of over 30 previous studies. Using improved experimental materials, we show that children disallow local pronoun binding with both referential and quantificational antecedents when Principle B is at issue (Experiment 1), but not when Principle B is neutralized (Experiment 2). When methodological flaws are reintroduced, we replicate the QA (Experiment 3). Drawing on evidence from adult language processing, we suggest that the role of Principle B as a filter on representations during sentence understanding, in concert with pragmatic infelicities in the tasks used, accounts for the wide variability in the DPBE in the literature.

show abstract

Section: Principle B Versus Principle Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

et al. 2009

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Overall, this serves as further evidence for the claim that a predictive mechanism is an integral part of sentence comprehension (Chen, Gibson, & Wolf, 2005;Crocker, 1994 Furthermore, this highlights similarity between the Genitive-of-Negation dependencies and other syntactic dependencies [e.g., wh-dependencies (Stowe, 1986;Sussman & Sedivy, 2003;Traxler & Pickering, 1996) and backwards anaphora (van Gompel & Liversegde, 2003;Kazanina et al, 2007)] in that in all cases the parser uses the first element of the dependency to actively anticipate its remainder. Critically, the dependency completion is anticipated in accordance with grammatical restrictions on the dependency.…”

Section: [T]he Woman Edited/sailed the Magazinementioning

confidence: 81%

Predicting Complex Syntactic Structure in Real Time: Processing of Negative Sentences in Russian

Kazanina

2017

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In Russian negative sentences the verb's direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific “genitive-of-negation” phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers’ active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.

show abstract

“…IDPL (just like DPL) has nothing to say about this. Especially for cataphora, it is pretty clear that a goal to resolve the pronoun has to be separately maintained as the regular incremental interpretation process keeps marching forward, and the cataphoric goal is (repeatedly) retrieved during the incremental processing of the post-cataphoric text and its resolution is (repeatedly) attempted (see Kazanina et al 2007 and Exp. 2 above for evidence).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 Kazanina et al (2007) take the temporal priority of syntactic information as evidence for the incremental and predictive nature of syntactic constraints. The question we want to investigate in Experiment 1 can therefore be further specified as follows: is this active search mechanism also semantically constrained?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts

Brașoveanu¹,

Dotlačil²

2015

SALT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The main question we investigate is whether meaning representations of the kind that are pervasive in formal semantics are built up incrementally and predictively when language is used in real time, in much the same way that the realtime construction of syntactic representations has been argued to be. The interaction of presupposition resolution with conjunctions vs. conditionals with a sentence-final antecedent promises to provide us with the right kind of evidence. Consider the following 'cataphoric' example and the contrast between AND and IF: Tina will have coffee with Alex again AND/ IF she had coffee with him at the local café. We expect the second clause to be more difficult after AND than after IF: the conjunction AND signals that an antecedent that could resolve the again presupposition is unlikely to come after this point (the second conjunct is interpreted relative to the context provided by the first conjunct), while the conditional IF leaves open the possibility that a suitable resolution for the again presupposition is forthcoming (the first clause is interpreted relative to the context provided by the second clause). We present experimental evidence supporting these predictions and discuss two approaches to analyze this kind of data.

show abstract

The effect of syntactic constraints on the processing of backwards anaphora

Cited by 102 publications

References 49 publications

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

Predicting Complex Syntactic Structure in Real Time: Processing of Negative Sentences in Russian

Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About