Processing Syntactic structure Flashcards
What ambiguity is illustrated in:
“The gardener instructed the coworker with the notebook?”
Prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity
does the coworker have the notebook or is he instructed by the gardener by means of the notebook; PP is either attached as a modifier of the gardener or into the verb phrase
What ambiguity is illustrated in:
“The student found in the library was asleep”
Reduced relative clause ambiguity
The student that was found in the library was asleep;
ambiguity arises from the omission of “that was” and an ambiguous verb form (simple past vs. past participle); The student found…the book. - “in the library” disambiguates and clarifies that the student was not the agent of the finding action but instead its patient; the student is the agent of the sleeping action
What are key characteristics of language processing that we have discussed?
Characterising language processing
- Time course: incrementality, expectations
- Information flow and representations: modularity, embodiment
- Impact on cognitive resources: complexity, ambiguity
What aspect of the ERP measurement are we comparing when we talk about an N400 or P600 ‘effect’?
Mean amplitudes
The ‘effect’ refers to comparing mean amplitudes (with a peak of 400 / 600 ms)
relative to stimulus onset for two or more conditions.
What visual-world study is frequently cited when referring to evidence against strict informational encapsulation?
Tanenhaus et al., 1995:
- Visual referential contrast effects on the resolution of local structural ambiguity
- Put the apple - on the towel - In the box: on the towel can be location (from where to put it) OR direction (to where), with two apples (two references) to choose from ‘on the towel’ becomes a modifier
- eye movement tracking
- the finding is an objection against modularity (Fodor)
(RECAP)
What is Fodor’s Modularity?
What does it consist of?
Fodor’s Modularity: a description of how information flows
a) transducers: whose function is to convert physical stimulation into neural signal
b) input systems: interpret transduced information. (they are modular(!) and responsible for basis cognitive activities)
c) Central system: for more complex cognitive activities such as analogical reasoning / are not modular
What are object affordances and syntactic disambiguation?
Object Affordances = actions that objects allow; a chair’s affordances is the action of sitting
- non-linguistic constraints can influence the early syntactic disambiguation
- informations outside of the linguistic system have a rapid influence on language processing
(It makes a difference when you have two bowls with eggs, and you give the instruction: to pour the egg in the bowl… which egg?)
- Study by Chamber et al., 2004
Developmental perspective
- main finding: children can not rapidly referential visual context for syntactical disambiguation, adults can.
- study by Trueswell et al, 1999 the design is like in Tanenhaus (1995) but with children (5y), ‘put the frog on the napkin in the box’
(children put the frog from the napkin it’s already on, on to the empty napkin, instead of directly to the box)
depicted events
pirate & princess scenario
rapid influence of depicted events on:
- structural disambiguation
- incremental thematic role assignment:
“die Prinzessin wäscht offensichtlich der Pirat”
(the princess is the patient and obviously washed by the pirate, who is the agent.)
study by Pulvermüller et al., 2008: EEG
Does stored linguistic and world knowledge allow incremental thematic role assignment and thematic structuring?
Yes, structural unambiguous sentences in a scenario including world knowledge lead to incremental thematic interpretation.
shown by Kamide et al.: 2003
(I know and presume, that the bunny is more likely to eat the cabbage than the fox.)
Visual World Studies
Difference between Kamide et al. & Tanenhaus?
Kamide: unambiguous sentences lead to incremental, sometimes predictive, thematic interpretation. (You expect the bunny to eat the cabbage): scene (!) is a constant factor
Tanenhaus: sentences are structurally ambiguous and the comprehension processes lead to structural disambiguation. (Looking to the object after you hear the word.) linguistic knowledge + visual referential context: sentence (!) is constant factor
what is syntactic priming?
- priming is a method to examine the influence of linguistic context on syntactic structuring
- importance: role of verb in priming structure during comprehension
what is a factor in pronoun resolution?
heuristics regarding syntactic aspects
- subject-preference: more looks to the referent that was the subject
- order mention; more looks to first mentioned character
- no interaction of order of mention & grammatical functions
