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Conceptual influences on word order and voice in sentence production: Evidence from Japanese
... For instance, in a sentence-recall task, Greek speakers tended to reverse the order of the sentential subject and object depending on the referents' animacy status [9]. When the subject was inanimate (e.g., stone) and the object animate (e.g., man), participants were more likely to misremember Subject-Verb-Object sentences (such as The stone hit the man) as Object-Verb-Subject sentences, underlining speakers' preferences to place animate before inanimate entities [9,10]. Animacy also influences grammatical role assignment such that animate referents are more likely realized as the subject of an utterance [11]. ...
... However, despite its pervasive effects at the sentence level, mixed results have been obtained for the role of animacy at the phrase level (i.e., regarding single constituents of a sentence such as conjoined noun phrases). For instance, when speakers of Japanese were asked to remember sentences like The boat and the fisherman were moving, they did not reverse the order of nouns when the inanimate noun preceded the animate noun [10]. Likewise, speakers of English showed no effect of animacy for coordinated noun phrases within sentences [11]. ...
... According to this view, animacy should not affect the sequence of conjoined noun phrases because animacy is exclusively linked to subjecthood. Note, however, that this view is incompatible with the observation that animacy can affect word order without changes in grammatical role assignment [9,10]. For instance, speakers of Greek preferred to place animate entities in early word order positions, irrespective of their grammatical role, suggesting that animacy affects linear ordering [9]. ...
Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish ) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.
... In formal linguistic theories, agents are described as the most unmarked in thematic role hierarchies; agents also tend to be mapped onto higher syntactic functions, such as the subject (Aissen, 1999;Croft, 1991;Dowty, 1991). In production, highly agentive elements tend to be animate and have high conceptual accessibility, which leads them to be positioned early in the syntactic linear ordering of sentential elements (e.g., Branigan et al., 2008;Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Tanaka et al., 2011). In comprehension, there is an advantage for word orders that begin with agents, facilitating better anticipation of the unfolding event and construction of a mental model of the event (e.g., Cohn & Paczynski, 2013;Ferreira et al., 2002;Townsend & Bever, 2001). ...
... The influence of animacy in linguistic phenomena has been described in formal linguistic theories such as in animacy hierarchies (Comrie, 1989;de Swart et al., 2008;Silverstein, 1976;Yamamoto, 1999), and animacy-influenced thematic hierarchies (Evans, 1997;Givón, 1984). In production, animacy relates to conceptual accessibility: elements that are animate tend to be mentioned earlier in the sentence as they are highly accessible and are likely to be mapped as the sentential subject (Branigan et al., 2008;Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Ferreira, 1994;McDonald et al., 1993;Tanaka et al., 2011). In comprehension, animacy bears on the initial interpretation of syntactically ambiguous utterances (e.g., Clifton et al., 2003;Ferreira & Clifton, 1986;Trueswell et al., 1994) and can interact with syntactic cues and affect processing difficulty (e.g., Ferreira, 2003;Kolk et al., 2003;Kuperberg et al., 2007;Stoops et al., 2014). ...
... If we assume that the grammar allows multiple word orders, a tendency for agent-first orders could be rooted in agent prominence within the cognitive system. As mentioned in the Introduction, a variety of perspectives suggest increased attention to the agent compared to other arguments by the language processing system, as well as a tendency to place agents early in the sentence, owing to their conceptual accessibility (e.g., Cohn & Paczynski, 2013;Tanaka et al., 2011). ...
Effects of animacy and agent prominence in linguistic and cognitive processing are well-established in the literature. However, it is less clear how strongly an agent argument will influence production and comprehension when a sentence also contains another prominent argument. We examine this question with Tagalog, a verb-initial language, which designates a syntactically prominent, subject-like element (the pivot) without demoting the grammatical status of the core agent. We implemented two experiments that investigated the influences of agent and pivot prominence on syntactic linear word order patterns in production and on anticipatory gaze patterns in comprehension. Tagalog's grammar allowed us to separate the influence of agentivity from animacy by manipulating the animacy of the pivot (animate pivots: agent and benefactive voices; inanimate pivots: patient and instrument voices). The production results contrasted with the comprehension results: agent and pivot prominence both emerged strongly in a fragment-completion production task, but animacy dominated anticipatory gaze patterns in a visual-world comprehension task. The results of these experiments demonstrate variability in production and comprehension outcomes as well as an apparent mismatch between the constraints that shape these two systems, which we attribute to contrasting goals in production versus comprehension and to the organization of information in verb-initial languages. The investigation highlights the value of research on languages with typologically understudied structural properties in revealing mechanisms of the production and comprehension systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... En revanche, certains facteurs comme le caractère animé n'étaient pas significatifs, contrairement à ce qui a été observé, selon les mêmes méthodes, dans d'autres langues comme l'anglais (Bresnan et al., 2007 ;Bresnan et Ford, 2010), l'allemand (Kempen et Harbusch, 2004), le grec moderne (Branigan et Feleki, 1999) ou le japonais (Tanaka et al., 2011). La pronominalité n'était pas non plus significative, mais on peut l'imputer au fait que la plupart des compléments pronominaux en français se cliticisent, ce qui les exclut de l'analyse de la complémentation postverbale. ...
... Toutefois, dans une modélisation où la pronominalité remplace la saillance, on lui observe également un effet significatif (« Arg2 pronominal » est associé à z = 2,2 ; p < 0,05). Ces types de contraintes, formalisables de manière plus explicite dans le cadre de la « Théorie de l'optimalité stochastique » (Bresnan et al., 2001), ont pu être observés dans d'autres langues (Kempen et Harbusch, 2004 ;Branigan et Feleki, 1999 ;Tanaka et al., 2011), ce qui tend vers l'idée de contraintes cognitives générales qui pèsent sur les grammaires des langues du monde. Notons par ailleurs que ces contraintes sont hétérogènes et ne sont pas simplement d'ordre syntaxique. ...
... Nous avons également mis en évidence certains facteurs significatifs qui déterminent le choix de la voix : animéité, définitude, pronominalité, saillance et longueur des arguments. Certains de ces facteurs ont pu être observés dans d'autres langues et pour d'autres constructions : l'animéité dans le passif en japonais (Tanaka et al., 2011), la définitude, la pronominalité, l'animéité et la longueur dans l'alternance dative en anglais (Bresnan et Ford, 2010), la longueur dans la complémentation postverbale en français (Thuilier, 2012a). Notre étude va donc dans le sens de la théorie de l'alignement harmonique, qui prévoit que les mêmes contraintes d'ordre préférentiel soient à l'oeuvre dans toutes les langues, indépendamment des fonctions syntaxiques. ...
We study the active/passive alternation in written French to discover preference constraints. We have extracted and annotated a sample of 500 clauses (250 active and 250 passive) of the French Treebank (Abeillé et al., 2019) and modeled them with logistic regression (Baayen, 2008). Short passives (without a par-phrase) are more frequent than long passive (77% of passives are short); in 80% of short passives, the omitted argument is present in the context. We show that argument length and information structure are important factors in active/passive alternation. We also show that the passive construction obeys more general cross-linguistic harmonic argument alignment constraints (Bresnan et al., 2001 and 2007).
... That is, referents or referring expressions can be more or less "accessible" or "active" in the speaker's mind. For instance, there is ample evidence that animate referents tend to be more accessible than inanimate ones and therefore are preferably realized as sentential subjects (e.g., Bock et al., 1992;McDonald et al., 1993;Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000;Van Nice and Dietrich, 2003;Tanaka et al., 2011). In the abovementioned example, speakers would thus be more inclined to produce a sentence like "The boy (+animate) was hit by the snowball (−animate)." ...
... Additionally, we manipulated the animacy status of the patient. As summarized above, animate referents have repeatedly been shown to be more accessible than inanimate ones (e.g., Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000;Van Nice and Dietrich, 2003;Tanaka et al., 2011), rendering animacy a prime factor influencing a referent's inherent accessibility. Because effects of animacy have been well established even for patients (e.g., Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000;Van Nice and Dietrich, 2003), we sought to compare these effects to our manipulation of derived accessibility (i.e., the visual preview of the patient character). ...
... Taken together, these findings suggest that the animacy status of a patient exerted an influence on both eye gaze and sentence production, although the effect was smaller than anticipated. How can this finding be reconciled with the vast number of studies highlighting the importance of animacy for sentence production (e.g., Bock and Warren, 1985;Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000;Branigan et al., 2008;Tanaka et al., 2011)? It should be stressed that instead of manipulating both agent and patient animacy, we exclusively manipulated patient characteristics. ...
Speakers’ readiness to describe event scenes using active or passive constructions has previously been attributed—among other factors—to the accessibility of referents. While most research has highlighted the accessibility of agents, the present study examines whether patients’ accessibility can be modulated by means of visual preview of the patient character (derived accessibility), as well as by manipulating the animacy status of patients (inherent accessibility). Crucially, we also examined whether effects of accessibility were amenable to the visuospatial position of the patient by presenting the patient character either to the left or to the right of the agent. German native speakers were asked to describe drawings depicting event scenes while their gaze and speech were recorded. Our results show that making patients more accessible using derived and inherent accessibility factors led to more produced passives, shorter speech onsets, and a reduction of fixations on patients. Complementing previous research on agent accessibility, our findings demonstrate that the accessibility of patients affected both sentence production and looking behavior. While effects were observed for both inherent and derived accessibility, they appeared to be more pronounced for the latter. Regarding character position, we observed a significant effect of position on participants’ gaze patterns and structural choices, suggesting that position itself can be considered an accessibility-related factor. Importantly, the position of a patient also interacted with our manipulation of its accessibility via visual preview. Participants produced more passives after preview than no preview for left-positioned but not for right-positioned patients, demonstrating that effects of patient accessibility (i.e., visual preview) were susceptible to character position. A similar interaction was observed for participants’ viewing patterns. These findings provide the first evidence that the position of a referent is a factor that interacts with other accessibility-related factors (i.e., cueing), emphasizing the need of controlling for position effects when testing referent accessibility.
... It has been observed in many sentence production studies that a perceptual property in an event, often noted as saliency, has an effect on word order preferences. Saliency, or properties connected to conceptual accessibility or animacy, is related to the thematic roles in an event, and some have suggested that the agent-before-patient or animate-before-inanimate order is preferred (Bock 1982;Bock and Warren 1985;Branigan et al. 2008;McDonald et al. 1993;Tanaka et al. 2011). For instance, Tanaka et al (2011) used a sentence recall task, and asked the participants to recall Japanese sentences such as those shown in (3). ...
... (3) a. SO word order Minato-de ryoosi-ga booto-o hakonda port-at fisherman-NOM boat-ACC carried b. OS word order Minato-de booto-o ryoosi-ga hakonda port-at boat-ACC fisherman-NOM carried 'At the port, the fisherman carried the boat.' Tanaka et al. (2011) observed that, when the participants recalled the sentences, they were more likely to invert the word order and produce an SO word order such as (3b). One interpretation of this result is that, in addition to syntactic factors, native speakers of Japanese prefer to produce sentences in which the agent comes before the patient. ...
... Our results also suggest that properties like saliency often have an influence on the sentence processing costs, but to a different extent in SO-versus OS-type languages. In quite a few production studies of SO-type languages, it has been found that cognitive properties such as saliency have an effect on the word order selections (Branigan et al. 2008;Tanaka et al. 2011). However, our results suggest that saliency is not a major factor explaining the response pattern in Truku. ...
Syntactic properties such as word orders are a major factor determining the difficulty of a sentence. In SO-type languages where the subject (S) precedes the object (O) in canonical word order, there is clear evidence that the SO word order is preferred over the OS word order. We investigate to what extent this SO bias is maintained even in typologically diverse languages like Truku, an Austronesian language, in which the Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) word order is canonical and a syntactically basic structure, and SVO is the derived word order and a syntactically more complex structure. It is important to investigate word order preferences in Truku because such inquiries allow us to determine to what extent these widely observed processing preferences are grounded in properties of the linguistic system and/or somewhat more general human cognitive properties. The syntactic complexity account predicts that, in Truku, the derived SVO word order should be more costly, while the saliency account predicts that the word orders in which an agent precedes a theme is preferred. Our auditory comprehension experiment showed that the OS word order was preferred by native speakers of Truku. This indicates that the often-observed SO preference is not a universal feature of language. Furthermore, the lack of a clear indication of the agent-before-theme preference suggests a correlation between the voice property of a given language and the importance of the saliency factor.
... Crucially, a number of factors appear to affect the way speakers choose a particular syntactic structure. One of the most well documented factors influencing the choice of syntactic constructions is the animacy status of a referent (e.g., Bock et al., 1992;McDonald et al., 1993;van Nice and Dietrich, 2003;Tanaka et al., 2011). In the example above, both referents (the woman and the man) are animate. ...
... Similarly, Tanaka et al. (2011) showed that speakers of Japanese -like English speakers -were more likely to erroneously recall animate referents as sentence subjects, confirming an increase in patient-first structures (i.e., passives) when patients were animate. They also found that Japanese speakers were more likely to assign animate * referents earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate referents, suggesting that animacy affected both syntactic structure (i.e., the rate of passivizations) and word order (see Tanaka et al., 2011). ...
... Similarly, Tanaka et al. (2011) showed that speakers of Japanese -like English speakers -were more likely to erroneously recall animate referents as sentence subjects, confirming an increase in patient-first structures (i.e., passives) when patients were animate. They also found that Japanese speakers were more likely to assign animate * referents earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate referents, suggesting that animacy affected both syntactic structure (i.e., the rate of passivizations) and word order (see Tanaka et al., 2011). Beyond sentence recall paradigms, animacy has also been shown to affect the choice of syntactic structure when participants had to describe visual events (e.g., van Nice and Dietrich, 2003;van de Velde et al., 2014). ...
How can a visual environment shape our utterances? A variety of visual and conceptual factors appear to affect sentence production, such as the visual cueing of patients or agents, their position relative to one another, and their animacy. These factors have previously been studied in isolation, leaving the question about their interplay open. The present study brings them together to examine systematic variations in eye movements, speech initiation and voice selection in descriptions of visual scenes. A sample of 44 native speakers of German were asked to describe depicted event scenes presented on a computer screen, while both their utterances and eye movements were recorded. Participants were instructed to produce one-sentence descriptions. The pictures depicted scenes with animate agents and either animate or inanimate patients who were situated to the right or to the left of agents. Half of the patients were preceded by a visual cue – a small circle appearing for 60 ms on a blank screen in the place of patients. The results show that scenes with left- rather than right-positioned patients lead to longer speech onset times, a higher probability of passive sentences and looks toward the patient. In addition, scenes with animate patients received more looks and elicited more passive utterances than scenes with inanimate patients. Visual cueing did not produce significant changes in speech, even though there were more looks to cued vs. non-cued referents, demonstrating that cueing only impacted initial scene scanning patterns but not speech. Our findings demonstrate that when examined together rather than separately, visual and conceptual factors of event scenes influence different aspects of behavior. In comparison to cueing that only affected eye movements, patient animacy also acted on the syntactic realization of utterances, whereas patient position in addition altered their onset. In terms of time course, visual influences are rather short-lived, while conceptual factors have long-lasting effects.
... In this paper, we specifically address the word order phenomenon in Japanese since there is some dispute as to whether animacy is related to the choice of word order in the language. This study explores the usages of word order changes in terms of heaviness and animacy based on a corpus analysis; there has been much dispute as to whether animacy has an independent effect on the choice of word orders (Bock et al. 1992;Branigan et al. 2008;Kahraman 2013;Kempen and Harbusch 2004;McDonald et al. 1993;Rosenbach 2005;Tanaka et al. 2011;Thompson 1990). ...
... Numerous studies have convincingly demonstrated that animacy influences the choice of word order (Bock et al. 1992;Branigan et al. 2008;Kahraman 2013;Kempen and Harbusch 2004;McDonald et al. 1993;Rosenbach 2005;Tanaka et al. 2011;Thompson 1990). In particular, there seems to be a general preference for animate referents to precede inanimate ones. ...
... In particular, there seems to be a general preference for animate referents to precede inanimate ones. In Japanese, Tanaka et al. (2011) conducted a sentence production experiment to measure the effects of animacy on the choice between SOV and OSV. In their experiment, participants were asked to remember a sentence presented aurally in eight blocks, each containing eight sentences. ...
In experiments, previous studies have observed that the choice of word order in Japanese is influenced not only by heaviness but also by animacy. To be more concrete, the heavy constituent tends to precede the light one and the animate referent tends to come before the inanimate one. Yet, the present corpus analysis demonstrates that word order changes are not motivated by animacy. This discrepancy can be accounted for by supposing that animacy has an impact on word order only when the effects of other factors are neutralized. It is possible that the effects of animacy are so weak that they work only in psycholinguistic experiments because other factors are controlled. On the other hand, the effects of animacy are not observed in this corpus study probably because other factors are not controlled in actual examples. Thus, I propose that researchers should utilize both naturalistic and experimental evidence in order to draw reasonable conclusions about the grammatical aspects of language.
... However, language production research generally suggests that speakers choose a particular word order to ease production rather than comprehension. Specifically, availability-based production models assume that speakers preferentially choose word orders that allow the earlier placing of words or phrases that are more available to them to facilitate production (Bock, 1982;1986a;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;V.Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). Studies have found that availability due to conceptual salience (Bock & Warren, 1985;McDonald et al., 1993;Tanaka et al., 2011), semantic priming (Bock, 1986a), or discourse givenness (Bock & Irwin, 1980;V.Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003) influences the choice between active and passive voice (e.g., The doctor administered the shock vs. ...
... Specifically, availability-based production models assume that speakers preferentially choose word orders that allow the earlier placing of words or phrases that are more available to them to facilitate production (Bock, 1982;1986a;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;V.Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). Studies have found that availability due to conceptual salience (Bock & Warren, 1985;McDonald et al., 1993;Tanaka et al., 2011), semantic priming (Bock, 1986a), or discourse givenness (Bock & Irwin, 1980;V.Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003) influences the choice between active and passive voice (e.g., The doctor administered the shock vs. The shock was administered by the doctor) and dative alternations (e.g., ...
... Although Tanaka et al. (2011) subsequently reported that animacy does not reliably influence the order of nouns within conjuncts in Japanese, McDonald et al. (1993) found animate-first preference for noun phrase conjuncts in English that occurred in isolation, outside of sentence contexts, suggesting that conceptual availability can influence the ordering of conjoined nouns. ...
... The accessibility (speed of memory retrieval) of elements in a sentence is involved in determining the linguistic form under such a process. In particular, elements with high accessibility tend to be assigned higher grammatical roles (e.g., subjects) than elements with low accessibility, and are produced earlier in the sentence (Bock and Werren 1985;Feleki and Branigan 1999;McDonald, Bock, and Kelly 1993;Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000;Tanaka et al. 2011;Yamashita and Chang 2001). Givenness is also a measure of accessibility, with given elements more accessible than new elements (Bock and Warren 1985). ...
... Therefore, the observation of the urgency principle in Kaqchikel does not negate the general assumption of incrementality in sentence production, but rather suggests that Kaqchikel is a language in which both principles are involved. In sentence production, the final realized linguistic form is determined not only by a single factor but also by the competition among various factors (Bates and MacWhinney 1989;Yamashita and Chang 2001;Tanaka et al. 2011). Although the general tendency in Kaqchikel is to produce SVO word order under incremental processing, the urgency principle is believed to occasionally motivate the production of VOS word order in a way that is contrary to incremental processing. ...
... In contrast, the lexical guidance effect often refers to the effect that the perceptually more prominent items are easier to be identified and subsequently lead to an early retrieval and placement in sentence formulation. This guidance effect mainly modulates phrase structure order, but it can also influence the speakers' choice of clause structures (Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007;Myachykov, Garrod, & Scheepers, 2009) Studies on the guidance effect, especially those that investigated production in a non-Germanic language, showed that the more accessible item directly influences word order (Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;Myachykov, Garrod, & Scheepers, 2010;Myachykov & Tomlin, 2008;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka, Lexical cueing in phrase encoding 9 Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). For example, Myachykov and Tomlin (2008) found that when native Russian speakers described a transitive event, an attentioncapturing cue that highlighted one referent of the event led to an early placement of the cued referent in sentence production. ...
... In contrast, the lexical guidance effect often refers to the effect that the perceptually more prominent items are easier to be identified and subsequently lead to an early retrieval and placement in sentence formulation. This guidance effect mainly modulates phrase structure order, but it can also influence the speakers' choice of clause structures (Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007;Myachykov, Garrod, & Scheepers, 2009) Studies on the guidance effect, especially those that investigated production in a non-Germanic language, showed that the more accessible item directly influences word order (Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;Myachykov, Garrod, & Scheepers, 2010;Myachykov & Tomlin, 2008;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka, Lexical cueing in phrase encoding 9 Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). For example, Myachykov and Tomlin (2008) found that when native Russian speakers described a transitive event, an attentioncapturing cue that highlighted one referent of the event led to an early placement of the cued referent in sentence production. ...
This paper examined the role of lexical processing in phrase structure building in sentence production. We asked whether speakers exploit a lexical cue as a lexical guide (i.e. the cued word occurs earlier in the sentence) and as a retrieval cue (i.e. a cue facilitates the retrieval of a memorised structure). In two experiments, participants recalled Dutch genitive sentences. In some recall trials, they received a lexical cue that repeated one argument of the to-be-recalled sentence. In two further experiments, participants read a genitive sentence and then generated a new one from a visually-presented triplet of arguments. The visual salience of the arguments and lexical overlap were manipulated. In all four experiments, speakers consistently started the phrase with the cued word. There was no evidence of a lexical cueing effect on structure retrieval. The findings suggest that speakers mainly exploit lexical information as a lexical guide when formulating phrase structures.
... Most language production experiments that investigated the mapping process have only considered the case where one concept was accessible (animate) and the other inaccessible (inanimate). That is, they excluded the conditions in which both concepts were animate or inanimate (e.g., Bock et al. 1992;McDonald et al. 1993, Tanaka et al. 2011, Branigan and Feleki 1999but see Van Nice andDietrich 2003 andIgoa Gonzales 1996, for experiments that orthogonally crossed animacy of agent and patient). ...
... Interestingly these languages allow speakers to put more accessible arguments (with respect to a number of constraints) at early positions in the sentence, rather than making them subject. For example, several authors argued that the animacy effect cannot be entirely reduced to grammatical positions in languages with a more flexible word order (e.g., in Odawa, a free word order language, Christianson and Ferreira 2005; in Japanese, Tanaka et al. 2011). Crucially these studies indicate that animacy, concurrently with other constraints (e.g., the given-new status), affects linear order as well. ...
Four experiments in Italian investigated how conceptual entities are mapped onto grammatical functions. By orthogonally manipulating the animacy of the elements partaking to a transitive event, we tested two views of the theme to function mapping process. Under the function mapping account, this mapping is a competition for the syntactic functions between concepts associated to different thematic roles (e.g., agent, patient), with animate entities and agents most likely to be mapped onto subject function (Bock and Levelt in handbook of psycholinguistics, Academic Press, San Diego, pp 945–984, 1994). The argument selection principle assumes that thematic roles can be decomposed into more primitive features, namely Proto-Roles (Dowty in language 67(3):547–619, 1991). Given a transitive event, the concept that possesses the largest number of semantic features prototypically associated with the agent is realized as the subject; the concept involving more patient-like entailments is realized as object. In Experiment 1, participants rated the Proto-Roles properties of the concepts partaking to transitive events. Experiment 2 involved a picture naming task of the same transitive events. Structural priming was used in Experiments 3 and 4 to influence the overall distribution of active and passive responses. In this way, the two views could be contrasted under different levels of bias towards the active. The results support the argument selection view under which theme to function mapping is influenced not only by the conceptual accessibility of the concepts but also by the mismatch between the semantic features of the argument (its animacy) and the thematic representation of the event. The data further generalize the evidence for structural priming to Italian.
... Исследования на материале языков, отличных от английского, показывают, что доступность может влиять на оба уровня (см. [Tanaka et al., 2011] для японского языка, а также обзор [Jaeger, Norcliffe, 2009]). Следует отметить, что в разных языках доступность аргументов может по-разному влиять на выбор конструкций при порождении речи: указание на пациенса привело к увеличению доли предложений в активном залоге с объектом в первой линейной позиции в русском языке [Pokhoday et al., 2019], но к увеличению доли пассивных конструкций в немецком [Schlenter et al., 2020]. ...
The paper describes key areas in current experimental research on argument structure. We discuss the experiments that compare verb classes in order to test the argument structure complexity hypotheses and to highlight common argument structure features. Then we present research on argument structure alternations, carried out both on groups of various verbs and on single verb root appearing in various syntactic contexts. Finally, we examine the experiments that focus on the role of argument structure in incremental sentence production.
... It has been well established that the conceptual properties that are bound to lemmas influence syntactic configuration in sentence production (Bock & Warren, 1985;F. Ferreira, 1994;Kelly et al., 1986;McDonald et al., 1993;Onishi et al., 2008;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka et al., 2011;Tannenbaum & Williams, 1968). Concretely, the inherent features of lexical concepts the speaker intends to express (e.g., animacy, concreteness, and prototypicality) and their derived features (e.g., topicality, focus, and thematic role) are informative of the type of syntactic functions that are assigned to these lexical concepts. ...
We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of connectives (additive vs. adversative connective), event similarity (similar event vs. different event), and topic cohesion (with or without available anaphoric antecedent). In four structural priming experiments, native Dutch participants were asked to read either a Dutch double object sentence or a prepositional object sentence and describe pictures that depicted ditransitive events. Critically, the prime and the target either were linked by a connective (en “and” or maar “but”) or were not linked. The verb overlap between the prime and the target was also manipulated. In Experiment 1, the presence of en facilitated structural priming, but only when the verbs were different. In Experiment 2, maar reduced structural priming when the verbs were repeated. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 in a within-subjects design. In Experiment 4, there was no referential link between the sentences. Now there was no connective effect on structural priming. Taken together, we demonstrated that the insertion of a connective influences syntactic persistence. The connective effects vary across semantic properties of the connectives, event similarity, and referential continuity, suggesting that the production of sentence structure is modulated by speakers’ prediction about listeners’ inference of coherence relations between consecutive utterances.
... However, those interpretations have been called into question following findings that the higher accessibility of an entity due to givenness (V. Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000) or animacy Kempen & Harbusch, 2004;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka et al., 2011;cf. Christianson & F. Ferreira, 2005;Van Nice & Dietrich, 2003) can influence linear ordering as well as function assignment in freer word order languages. ...
How speakers sequence words and phrases remains a central question in cognitive psychology. Here we focused on understanding the representations and processes that underlie structural priming, the speaker's tendency to repeat sentence structures encountered earlier. Verb repetition from the prime to the target led to a stronger tendency to produce locative variants of the spray-load alternation following locative primes (e.g., load the boxes into the van) than following with primes (e.g., load the van with the boxes). These structural variants had the same constituent structure, ruling out abstract syntactic structure as the source of the verb boost effect. Furthermore, using cleft constructions (e.g., What the assistant loaded into the lift was the equipment), we found that the thematic role order (thematic role-position mappings) of the prime can persist separately from its argument structure (thematic role-syntactic function mappings). Moreover, both priming effects were enhanced by verb repetition and interacted with each other when the construction of the prime was also repeated in the target. These findings are incompatible with the traditional staged model of grammatical encoding, which postulates the independence of abstract syntax from thematic role information. We propose the interactive structure-building account, according to which speakers build a sentence structure by choosing a thematic role order and argument structure interactively based on their prior co-occurrence together with other structurally relevant information such as verbs and constructions.
... The fact that such words tend to go earlier has been related to the accessibility of the words in production: The idea is that speakers are able to access the lexical forms for certain concepts more quickly-they "come to mind" faster-and so they say the corresponding words earlier as part of a greedy, "easy-first" language production strategy (1,(64)(65)(66)(67)(68)(69)(70)(71)(72). ...
I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate–distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in human language production, which is grounded in information theory and control theory. Language production is cast as the sequential selection of actions to achieve a communicative goal subject to a capacity constraint on cognitive control. In a series of calculations, simulations, corpus analyses, and comparisons to experimental data, I show that the model directly predicts some of the major known qualitative and quantitative phenomena in language production, including semantic interference and predictability effects in word choice; accessibility-based (“easy-first”) production preferences in word order alternations; and the existence and distribution of disfluencies including filled pauses, corrections, and false starts. I connect the rate–distortion view to existing models of human language production, to probabilistic models of semantics and pragmatics, and to proposals for controlled language generation in the machine learning and reinforcement learning literature.
... If this account is correct, SO is not a universally preferred order. In the alternative view, word order preferences follow from universal human cognitive features; if that is the case, SO word order should be preferred regardless of the basic word order of any individual language (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky 2009; Tanaka et al. 2011). These views both correctly predict that SO word order is preferred in SO languages: SVO, SOV, and VSO. ...
This volume showcases the contributions that formal experimental methods can make to syntactic research in the 21st century. Syntactic theory is both a domain of study in its own right, and one component of an integrated theory of the cognitive neuroscience of language. It provides a theory of the mediation between sound and meaning, a theory of the representations constructed during sentence processing, and a theory of the end-state for language acquisition. Given the highly interactive nature of the theory of syntax, this volume defines “experimental syntax” in the broadest possible terms, exploring both formal experimental methods that have been part of the domain of syntax since its inception (i.e., acceptability judgment methods) and formal experimental methods that have arisen through the interaction of syntactic theory with the domains of acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax brings these methods together into a single experimental syntax volume for the first time, providing high-level reviews of major experimental work, offering guidance for researchers looking to incorporate these diverse methods into their own work, and inspiring new research that will push the boundaries of the theory of syntax.
... Sentence recall tasks are not widely used as a method to investigate the time-course of language production, and speakers in recall experiments may deploy planning procedures that are fundamentally different from those in naturalistic production. However, it is worth noting that the accessibility effect on word order, the effect that is usually assumed to arise from the temporal dynamics of sentence planning, can be observed in recall-based experiments (e.g., Bock and Irwin 1980;McDonald, Bock, and Kelly 1993;Tanaka et al. 2011), as in naturalistic production (e.g., Kempen and Harbusch 2011). Also, in our lab, several lines of study show that the time-course of verb planning is similar between recall-based experiments and picture-description experiments (e.g., Momma and Yoshida 2021). ...
... Many sentence-production studies have shown that agentive, animate, concrete, and salient referents are conceptually more accessible in an event, and tend to be placed in the sentence-initial subject position (cf. Bock and Warren 1985;Tanaka et al. 2011).1 In other words, conceptually more accessible subjects are easier to process than other conceptually less accessible referents (such as direct objects and obliques). ...
... Specifically, speakers tend to favor color-before-pattern orders (e.g., green spotty bow) rather than the reverse order (spotty green bow), not only in languages with prenominal modification (Fukumura, 2018;Tarenskeen et al., 2015) but also in a language with postnominal modification such as Basque (Fukumura & Santesteban, 2017). Color tends to be more salient and over-specified more often than pattern (i.e., green spotted bow when spotted bow was sufficient for identification) (Fukumura, 2018;Haywood et al., 2003;Tarenskeen et al., 2015), so these preferences can be explained in terms of accessibility-based production models that claim that speakers preferentially place the more salient or accessible information earlier to enable incremental production processes (e.g., Bock, 1986b;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;Fukumura, 2018;Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;McDonald et al., 1993;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Tanaka et al., 2011). Crucial to the current study, such color-first preferences can be overridden by priming. ...
Speakers frequently reuse earlier encountered structures. A long-standing view in language production research is that this structural priming is driven by the persistence of abstract syntax, independent from unordered, conceptual representations. However, evidence has been building that non-syntactic information can also influence structural choice. Here we examined whether and how the syntactic priming of relative clause structures might interact with the priming of the conceptual category order of adjectives in noun phrase production. Study 1 found that speakers are more likely to produce relative clause structures (spotted bow that’s green) after having heard relative clause structures (striped lock that’s blue) as opposed to an alternative structure (striped blue lock), and they also tended to repeat the conceptual order of the prime, with more pattern-first orders after pattern-first primes than after color-first primes. Critically, we found larger syntactic priming when the conceptual order of the prime persisted more in the target and larger conceptual order priming when the syntactic structure of the prime persisted more in the target. Studies 2 and 3 found that conceptual category order priming can be enhanced by adjective overlap as well as noun overlap between prime and target, whereas syntactic priming can only be enhanced by noun overlap. These results supported the interactive priming account: Although the syntactic structure and the conceptual order are represented at different levels and hence can be activated independently, the link between them is also primed, which enhances priming at both levels.
... Hörberg, 2018;Lee, 2006;Temperley, 2003) or based on studies low in ecological validity (e.g. sentence recall studies, see Kurumada & Jaeger, 2015;Tanaka et al., 2011). To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that take information in the discourse context into account. ...
Grammatical encoding has been suggested to be driven by communicative efficiency – a balance between production ease and communicative success. Evidence for this view comes from studies indicating that speakers balance their use of morphosyntactic cues to grammatical functions with respect to animacy. However, these studies have not taken cues in the discourse context into account. In a picture-description task, we investigate the influence of animacy on the morphosyntactic encoding of grammatical functions in Swedish transitive sentences. These sentences are produced in discourse contexts with additional information about grammatical functions. We find various morphosyntactic cues to grammatical functions (e.g. SVO word order and case marking) to more frequently be used when the object referent is animate. Speakers thus balance their use of cues to grammatical functions, even when the discourse context is informative about those functions. These findings provide direct evidence for the view that grammatical encoding is influenced by communicative efficiency.
... Support for this comes from the finding that English structural priming is insensitive to tense/aspect variation in the verb (Pickering & Branigan, 1998), but German priming is changed by these manipulations (Chang, Baumann, Pappert, & Fitz, 2015). Evidence for differences in Japanese production processing comes from studies that have found that animacy can influence positional processing in scrambling in Japanese (Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011), but not positional processing in English (McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993). Connectionist models of production have been developed which can explain these cross-linguistic processing differences as a result of the language acquisition algorithm that is used to learn these languages in the first place (Japanese: Chang, 2009;German: Chang et al., 2015). ...
Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine this issue, meaning overlap with dative targets was manipulated in two structural priming experiments. In Experiment 1, datives primed dative targets, but structurally similar primes with idiomatic meanings did not prime. In Experiment 2, transitive primes that differed from datives in thematic roles showed as much priming as dative primes. The transitive results demonstrate that scrambling-based alternations in Japanese can be primed from structures that differ in role meaning, but the lack of idiom priming means that these structures may be less independent of meaning than those in other languages.
... Dahl and Fraurud, 1996;Dahl, 2000;German: Kempen and Harbusch, 2004;Norwegian: Øvrelid, 2004; for review, see Du Bois, 2003). 3 And, when given an implicit choice, speakers preferentially encode animate and previously mentioned referents as subject, rather than object (e.g., English: Bock and Irwin, 1980;Bock and Warren, 1985;German: Nice and Dietrich, 2003;Greek: Feleki and Branigan, 1999;Japanese: Ferreira and Yoshita, 2003;Tanaka et al., 2011;Tagalog: Sauppe, 2017;Chinese: Hsiao and MacDonald, 2016; for a cross-linguistic review, see Jaeger and Norcliffe, 2009). Prominence properties are thus statistically informative about argument assignment, so that expectation-based accounts predict that prominence properties should affect argument interpretation. ...
A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing.
... One such strategy is the Easy First Bias: easier-to-produce elements tend to occur before harder-toproduce ones, buying the speaker time to plan those harder elements. This bias has been attested in the placement of more accessible words before less accessible words (Bock, 1982), the placement of animate before inanimate nouns (Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011), sound patterns in infant babbling (MacNeilage & Davis, 2000), and the execution of complex actions (Gibson, Wasserman, & Kamil, 2007). The Easy First Bias thus serves as a link between production and the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving it: where codeswitches occur can tell us about how they were planned and produced. ...
A common practice often attested in bilingual and multilingual communities the world over is the combination of languages within a single utterance or conversation, a practice known as codeswitching. While sociolinguistic studies of spontaneous codeswitching have demonstrated its structure and systematicity, psycholinguistic approaches have focused on the cognitive mechanisms underlying language switching, most often at the lexical level. In the present study, we seek to investigate these mechanisms using spontaneous codeswitching from an established community of Spanish-English bilinguals in northern New Mexico. Focusing on the clausal rather than the lexical level, we find that global speech rates are fastest when bilinguals codeswitch compared to speaking only one language at a time. These results point to codeswitching as a unique discourse mode that these bilinguals use to facilitate production and suggests that what may appear costly at one level may be beneficial at another.
... These observations raise the question of why canonical is preferred over non-canonical word orders in sentence comprehension. One possible factor is conceptual accessibility ("the ease with which the mental representation of some potential referent can be activated in or retrieved from memory", Bock & Warren, 1985, p. 50) (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2009a, 2009bKemmerer, 2012;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). In the languages in which an S precedes an O, a conceptually more accessible agent precedes a conceptually less accessible patient in canonical word orders, whereas the opposite order occurs in non-canonical word orders. ...
Sentences with filler-gap dependency are more difficult to process than those without, as reflected by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) such as sustained left anterior negativity (SLAN). The cognitive processes underlying SLAN may support associating a filler with a temporally distant gap in syntactic representation. Alternatively, processing filler-gap dependencies in the absence of a supportive context involves additional discourse processing. The present study conducted an ERP experiment that manipulated syntactic complexity (subject–object–verb [SOV] and object–subject–verb [OSV]) and discourse (the supportive and non-supportive context) in Japanese. The result showed a SLAN in OSV relative to SOV in the non-supportive but not the supportive context, which suggests that the difficulty involved in processing OSV in Japanese is largely due to a pragmatic factor. The present study contributes to a better understanding of how the language-processing system builds long-distance dependency by interacting with the memory system. [Open Access]
... But it could be advantageous in other situations. In production experiments, language users do not recall sentences verbatim; they often "regenerate" sentences by placing the most salient or available information early (e.g., McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993;Potter & Lombardi, 1990;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). If listeners also exploit such "flexibility" during parallel processing, over-specified later-mentioned attributes could be used early when they are highly salient. ...
Using eye-tracking, we examined if over-specification hinders or facilitates referent selection, and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their eye movements were monitored. The referring expressions were presented either simultaneously with the displays, so the attributes could be incrementally processed in sequence, or before the display presentation, so the attributes could be processed in parallel from the outset of search. Experiment 1 showed that when the attributes were processed incrementally, how quickly an earlier-mentioned attribute discriminated determined whether a late-mentioned, over-specified attribute contributed to discrimination: When color was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the referent was selected fast regardless of the second-mentioned pattern, whereas when pattern was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the second-mentioned color facilitated discrimination. Experiment 2 found that under incremental processing, color mention after a fully discriminating pattern increased fixations but delayed referent selection relative to a pattern-only description; under parallel processing, however, color mention immediately eliminated alternatives and sped up referent selection. Experiment 3 showed that pattern mention after a fully discriminating color delayed referent selection and tended to reduce fixations relative to a color-only description in both processing modes. Hence, additional attributes can speed up referent selection but only when they can discriminate much faster than alternative attributes mentioned in a more concise description, and critically, when they can be used early for referent search.
... Previous studies have shown that one influential feature in the selection of active/passive voice and word order when describing or recalling transitive events is conceptual accessibility (Japanese: Tanaka et al. 2011;Spanish: Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000;Tzeltal: Norcliffe et al. 2015). More specifically, conceptually more salient and more accessible entities such as animate nouns tend to be mentioned earlier in a sentence than conceptually less salient and less accessible ones such as inanimate nouns (Bock 1986;Dowty 1991). ...
The embodied cognition hypothesis postulates that human cognition is fundamentally grounded in our experience of interacting with the physical world (Barsalou in Behav Brain Sci 22:577–609, 1999). Research has shown bi-directional associations between physical action and the processes of understanding language: language comprehension seems to activate implied visual and motor components (Zwaan and Taylor in J Exp Psychol Gen 135(1):1–11, 2006), and action behavior seems to facilitate the comprehension of associated action-language (Beilock et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:13269–13273, 2008). Although numerous research studies have reported a link between action and language comprehension, the exact nature of their association remains subject to debate (Chatterjee in Lang Cognit 2:79–116, 2010). Moreover, the role of action in the production of language is under-explored, as are general language production processes in Austronesian languages. The endangered Austronesian language Truku provides typological patterns that are both under-examined in psycholinguistic research and informative for questions of language production. Truku allows flexibility in the relative location of verbs versus arguments in sentence production, and uses a symmetrical voice system that marks the prominence of different participants in an event. Working with native speakers of Truku, we tested whether performing physical motions immediately affects the conceptual saliency of the components represented in a to-be-described event in ways that guide speakers’ visual attention and shape their utterance formulation. More specifically, we investigated whether speakers’ engagement as an agent or patient in a non-speech physical action affects initial eye-fixations on agent versus patient participants in a visual scene, as well as word order and grammatical voice choices in the speakers’ descriptions of simple transitive events. The results revealed significant effects of physical action on the relative location and prominence of agents in subsequent sentence formulation, and on online patterns of eye fixations. These results provide further support for language-action connections in cognitive processing, and shed light on the cross-linguistic patterns of sentence production.
... There are two interrelated but different ways in which relative conceptual saliencies affect word order selection in sentence production. First, conceptual factors may directly affect word order selection (De Smedt, 1990;Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987;Myachykov & Tomlin, 2008;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). The order of word retrieval from the mental lexicon at the stage of grammatical processing may be determined by the availability of individual concepts at the stage of conceptual processing, and the structure of the sentence being generated is accordingly constrained by whichever word is retrieved first. ...
The word order that is easiest to understand in a language generally coincides with the word order most frequently used in that language. In Kaqchikel, however, there is a discrepancy between the two: the syntactically basic VOS incurs the least cognitive load, whereas SVO is most frequently employed. This suggests that processing load is primarily determined by grammatical processes, whereas word order selection is affected by additional conceptual factors. Thus, the agent could be conceptually more salient than other elements even for Kaqchikel speakers. This hypothesis leads us to the following expectations: (1) utterance latency should be shorter for SVO sentences than for VOS sentences; (2) Kaqchikel speakers should pay more attention to agents than to other elements during sentence production; and (3) despite these, the cognitive load during sentence production should be higher for SVO than for VOS. A Kaqchikel sentence production experiment confirmed all three expectations.
... These sentence types are among the most commonly studied sentence types in investigations of both language learning and adult psycholinguistics. Passive sentences are among the most commonly elicited or comprehended sentences in language studies with adults (e.g., Bock, 1987;Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Dapretto & Bookheimer, 1999;Ferreira, 1994;Street & Dabrowska, 2010;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011) and are a key sentence type used in investigations of children's early sentence production and comprehension skills (Bever, 1970;Brooks & Tomasello, 1999;Huang et al., 2017;Huang, Zheng, Meng, & Snedeker, 2013;Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985;Savage, Lieven, Theakston, & Tomasello, 2003). Finding that passive sentences were more common in picture books would have both theoretical and practical implications for understanding language learning trajectories. ...
Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children’s picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which picture book text may systematically differ from typical child-directed speech. The analyses show that picture books contain more rare and complex sentence types, including passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses, than does child-directed speech. These differences in the patterns of language contained in picture books and typical child-directed speech suggest that one important means by which picture book reading may come to be associated with improved language outcomes is by providing children with types of complex language that might be otherwise rare in their input.
... The change of the word will lead to different perceptions. Meanwhile, the order of the keywords affects the perception of the sentence [18]. ...
... A characterization of such biases is illustrated in the tendency for items that are more accessible to appear both earlier in utterances and at more salient syntactic structures than items that are more difficult to retrieve. This is exemplified in the preference for individuals to speak of previously mentioned information before introducing new information in the discourse (Bock and Irwin 1980;Ferreira and Yoshita 2003;Tanaka et al. 2011) or in the tendency to minimize dependency length (Stallings et al. 1998;Yamashita and Chang 2001). ...
Experience-based approaches to language hold that individuals become sensitive to distributed emergent phenomena in their linguistic experience. The purpose of this paper is to bring together experience-based perspectives from the domains of cognitive psychology and linguistics. First, we present an overview of the cognitive processes that underpin experience-based learning, and review the cognitive biases that have been attributed to the emergence of distributional regularities in language. We then discuss the P-chain (Dell, G. S. & F. Chang. 2014. The P-chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition.
I present a computational‐level model of language production in terms of a combination of information theory and control theory in which words are chosen incrementally in order to maximize communicative value subject to an information‐theoretic capacity constraint. The theory generally predicts a tradeoff between ease of production and communicative accuracy. I apply the theory to two cases of apparent availability effects in language production, in which words are selected on the basis of their accessibility to a speaker who has not yet perfectly planned the rest of the utterance. Using corpus data on English relative clause complementizer dropping and experimental data on Mandarin noun classifier choice, I show that the theory reproduces the observed phenomena, providing an alternative account to Uniform Information Density and a promising general model of language production which is tightly linked to emerging theories in computational neuroscience.
This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language acquisition, processing, typology, language contact, language evolution and change, and formal approaches. Gradient approaches have been very fruitful in some domains, such as language processing, but their potential is not fully realized yet. This may be due to practical reasons. We discuss the most pressing methodological challenges in corpus-based and experimental research of word order and propose some practical solutions.
During the production of spoken sentences, the linearisation of a 'thought' is accomplished via the process of grammatical encoding, i.e., the building of a hierarchical syntactic frame that fixes the linear order of lexical concepts. While much research has demonstrated the independence of lexical and syntactic representations, exactly what is represented remains a matter of dispute. Moreover, theories differ in terms of whether words or syntax drive grammatical encoding. This debate is also central to theories of the time-course of grammatical encoding. Speaking is usually a rapid process in which articulation begins before an utterance has been entirely planned. Current theories of grammatical encoding make different claims about the scope of grammatical encoding prior to utterance onset, and the degree to which planning scope is determined by linguistic structure or by cognitive factors. The authors review current theories of grammatical encoding and evaluate them in light of relevant empirical evidence. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many previous assumptions in syntactic theory and language processing. Based on a case study in field-based comparative psycholinguistics, this pioneering book is the first to explore the neurocognition of endangered 'object-before-subject' languages, such as Kaqchikel and Seediq. It draws on a range of methods - including linguistic fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, corpus research, questionnaire surveys, behavioural experiments, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy – to consider preferred constituent orders in both language and thought, examining comprehension as well as production. In doing so, it highlights the importance of field-based cross-linguistic cognitive neuroscientific research in uncovering universal and language-particular aspects of the human language faculty, and the interaction between language and thought.
All living beings try to save effort, and humans are no exception. This groundbreaking book shows how we save time and energy during communication by unconsciously making efficient choices in grammar, lexicon and phonology. It presents a new theory of 'communicative efficiency', the idea that language is designed to be as efficient as possible, as a system of communication. The new framework accounts for the diverse manifestations of communicative efficiency across a typologically broad range of languages, using various corpus-based and statistical approaches to explain speakers' bias towards efficiency. The author's unique interdisciplinary expertise allows her to provide rich evidence from a broad range of language sciences. She integrates diverse insights from over a hundred years of research into this comprehensible new theory, which she presents step-by-step in clear and accessible language. It is essential reading for language scientists, cognitive scientists and anyone interested in language use and communication.
Bock et al. (1992) found that the binding of animacy features onto grammatical roles is susceptible to priming in sentence production. Moreover, this effect did not interact with structural priming. This finding supports an account according to which syntactic representations are insensitive to the consistency of animacy-to-structure mapping. This account has contributed greatly to the development of syntactic processing theories in language production. However, this study has never been directly replicated and the few related studies showed mixed results. A meta-analysis of these studies failed to replicate the findings of Bock et al. (1992). Therefore, we conducted a well-powered replication (n = 496) that followed the original study as closely as possible. We found an effect of structural priming and an animacy priming effect, replicating Bock et al.’s findings. In addition, we replicated Bock et al.’s (1992) observed null interaction between structural priming and animacy binding, which suggests that syntactic representations are indeed independent of semantic information about animacy.
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined the constraints that condition voice use, voice selection, argument position, and thematic role assignment, thus providing the first quantitative analysis of verb argument structure variation in the language. We also examined whether children are sensitive to the constraints on variability. Our analyses showed that, despite the diversity of structures that children have to learn under Tagalog’s voice system, there are unique factors that strongly predict the speakers’ choice between the voice and word order alternations, with children’s choices related to structure alternations being similar to what is available in their input. The results thus suggest that input distributions provide many cues to the acquisition of the Tagalog voice system, making it eminently learnable despite its apparent complexity.
This study aims to find out development of android based learning media that adopts the Concept Sentence model for students with hearing impairment, so that their learning outcomes, especially in understanding a social science’s learning materials would increase. The subjects of the study were 30 students from one of the special schools for students with hearing impairment in Surakarta City. The present study was conducted using a research and development method. The data were collected using a questionnaire while Miles and Huberman model of Analysis was employed for the data analysis. The results show that most of the students consider that they had difficulty in understanding the board material of social science, due to the inadequateness of the previous media. The students need a media that come with the required competence to be achieved, clearly and briefly delivered using words and punctuations that can be easily understood by the students. The students wish for an interesting media display and most of them assent on the use of “Belajar IPS itu Asyik dan Menyenangkan” as the title on the learning media’s homepage.
Acceptability rating questionnaires are a highly accessible tool for the experimental study of different syntactic phenomena, however, for the study of word order preferences, they are not as efficient as sentence production experiments. In this paper, we present a constrained sentence production task implemented via web-based self-administrated questionnaires. In order to highlight the advantages of such a paradigm, we compare the results of two experiments, an acceptability rating and a sentence completion task, using the same experimental material in order to study constituent ordering preferences in French and Persian. Our results show that acceptability rating data reflect the variation observed in production data only in a reduced manner and, consequently, make it difficult to study factors with small effect size or to identify a canonical word order among different grammatically possible alternatives.
A major goal of the quantitative study of syntax has been to identify factors that have predictive power on speaker choices in the face of word-order or valence alternations (e.g. Arnold et al. 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan & Ford 2010; Bader & Häussler 2010). In this paper, we study the role of animacy on the order of constituents in French. Animacy has been shown to affect sentence production in other languages, either directly (Feleki & Branigan 1999; Kempen & Harbusch 2004; Tanaka et al. 2011) or indirectly through grammatical role assignment (McDonald et al. 1993). Corpus studies however, have failed to find such an effect in French (Thuilier 2012a; Thuilier et al. 2014). Using a sentence recall task, we examined whether animacy has an impact on linear ordering or on grammatical function assignment. While we do find evidence for a role of animacy in the choice between active and passive voice, we do not find a preference to place animate arguments first with ditransitive verbs nor with nominal coordinations. While these findings tend to support the indirect hypothesis (McDonald et al. 1993; Kempen & Harbusch 2004), we also find what may look like an anti-animacy effect: inanimate direct objects tend to precede animate indirect objects. We propose that canonical mappings between syntactic function and semantic role play a role in putting (inanimate theme) direct objects before (animate recipient) indirect objects, thus overriding the animacy first tendency in French.
Heaviness (or phrasal length) has been shown to trigger mirror-image constituent ordering preferences in head-initial and head-final languages (heavy-late vs. heavy-first). These preferences are commonly attributed to a general cognitive pressure for processing efficiency obtained by minimizing the overall head-dependents linear distance-measured as the distance between the verb and the head of its left/right-most complement (Hawkins's Minimizing Domains) or as the sum of the distances between the verb and its complements (Dependency Length Minimization). The alternative language-specific accessibility-based production account, that considers longer constituents to be conceptually more accessible and views heavy-first as a salient-first preference, is dismissed because it implies differential sentence production in SOV and SVO languages. This paper studies the effect of phrasal length in Persian, a flexible SOV language displaying mixed head direction and differential object marking. We investigated the effect of linear distance as well as the effect of conceptual enrichment in two sentence production experiments. Our results provide clear evidence that support DLM while undermining Hawkins's MiD. However, they also show that some length effects cannot be captured by a dependency-distance-minimizing model and the conceptual accessibility hypothesis also needs to be taken into account to explain ordering preferences in Persian. Importantly, our findings indicate that distance minimization has a less strong effect in Persian than previously shown for other SOV languages.
We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple ( N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility , the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory.
In many languages with subject-before-object as a syntactically basic word order, transitive sentences in which the subject precedes the object have been reported to have a processing advantage over those in which the subject follows the object in sentence comprehension. Three sources can be considered to account for this advantage, namely, syntactic complexity (filler-gap dependency), conceptual accessibility (the order of thematic roles), and pragmatic requirement. To examine the effect of these factors on the processing of simple transitive sentences, the present study conducted two event-related potential experiments in Seediq, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, by manipulating word orders (basic VOS vs. non-basic SVO), the order of thematic roles (actor vs. goal voice), and discourse factors (presence/absence of visual context). The results showed that, compared to VOS, SVO incurred a greater processing load (reflected by a P600) when there was no supportive context, irrespective of voice alternation; however, SVO did not incur a greater processing load when there was supportive context and the discourse requirement was satisfied. We interpreted these results as evidence that the processing difficulty of the non-basic word order in Seediq is associated with a discourse-level processing difficulty.
In der vorliegenden Dissertation geht es um Verarbeitungsprozesse innerhalb der Satzproduktion. Die im Rahmen der Arbeit durchgeführte Studie basiert auf dem Satzproduktionsmodell von Bock und Levelt (1994). Im Gegensatz zu früheren Studien wird das Satzproduktionssystem jedoch nicht nur in pragmatisch neutralen, sondern auch in pragmatisch variierenden Kommunikationssituationen untersucht. Ziel ist es, mit Hilfe der Eye-Tracking-Technologie die Art der Informationsverarbeitung während des Sprechens festzustellen. In insgesamt drei Experimenten werden visuell dargebotene Ereignisse von deutschsprachigen Probanden beschrieben, wobei die visuelle, semantische und kontextuelle Salienz der Ereignisteilnehmer als Einflussfaktoren systematisch manipuliert werden. Analysen der Sprech- und Blickbewegungsdaten führen zu der Aussage, dass die Satzproduktion im Deutschen generell ein strukturell-inkrementell verlaufender Prozess ist, bei dem nicht nur der semantischen Ereignisstruktur, sondern auch der Informationsstruktur eine zentrale Bedeutung zukommt. Mit diesem Befund gelingt es, die Inkrementalitätstheorie auf die pragmatische Verarbeitungsebene zu erweitern und die vorhandenen Satzproduktionsmodelle, welche dem Kontext bisher nur eine vergleichsweise geringe Beachtung geschenkt haben, zu bereichern. Des Weiteren wird eine Verbindung zwischen der Informationsstruktur und der semantischen Struktur auf der Mikroplanungsebene des Satzproduktionssystems festgestellt. Dieser Befund erlaubt somit neue Erkenntnisse über die Arbeitsweise der Mikroplanung. Darüber hinaus deuten Ergebnisse der Studie darauf hin, dass kontextuelle Informationen bei der Satzproduktion im Deutschen vorrangig verarbeitet werden. Um eine Übersicht über die Verarbeitungshierarchie verschiedener Faktoren bei der Satzplanung zu geben, wird im Rahmen der Dissertation eine Prioritätenliste entwickelt.
We use visual world eye-tracking to provide a first look into the real-time production of an under-researched but communicatively crucial construction – wh-questions. We investigate whether the transition from abstract message to highly-structured utterances (linguistic encoding) is driven by linear order (positional processing) or subjecthood assignment (functional processing). Experiment 1 decouples positional and functional processes by comparing production of English declaratives versus object wh-questions (‘Which nurses did the maids tickle?’). Experiment 2 compares the production of declaratives versus object wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese to investigate potential information-focus effects on linguistic encoding and tests whether Experiment 1’s findings could be due to focus. Experiment 1 found that even though the articulation of a sentence is necessarily linear, speakers do not necessarily encode sentences in accordance with the linear order in which the words are uttered. Experiment 2 suggests that information-focus does not guide speakers' eye-movements during linguistic encoding.
In many languages with flexible word orders, canonical word order has a processing advantage over non-canonical word orders. This observation suggests that it is more costly for the parser to represent syntactically complex sentences because of filler-gap dependency formation. Alternatively, this phenomenon may relate to pragmatic factors because most previous studies have presented non-canonical word orders without felicitous context, which violates participants’ expectations regarding the information structure encoded by non-canonical word orders. The present study conducted an event-related potential experiment to examine the locus of the processing difficulty associated with non-canonical word orders in Japanese by manipulating word order (SOV vs. OSV) and the givenness of arguments. The non-canonical OSV sentence has been used felicitously when the O was mentioned in a prior discourse to make the discourse more coherent. The experiment’s results showed that OSV elicited a sustained left anterior negativity from O to S and a P600 effect at the S position compared to that of SOV in the infelicitous but not in the felicitous context. This result suggests that the processing difficulty of non-canonical word orders in Japanese is alleviated by discourse factors, such as the alignment of discourse-old and discourse-new NPs. [Open Access]
The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.
This paper identifies several serious problems with the widespread use of ANOVAs for the analysis of categorical outcome variables such as forced-choice variables, question-answer accuracy, choice in production (e.g. in syntactic priming research), et cetera. I show that even after applying the arcsine-square-root transformation to proportional data, ANOVA can yield spurious results. I discuss conceptual issues underlying these problems and alternatives provided by modern statistics. Specifically, I introduce ordinary logit models (i.e. logistic regression), which are well-suited to analyze categorical data and offer many advantages over ANOVA. Unfortunately, ordinary logit models do not include random effect modeling. To address this issue, I describe mixed logit models (Generalized Linear Mixed Models for binomially distributed outcomes, Breslow & Clayton, 1993), which combine the advantages of ordinary logit models with the ability to account for random subject and item effects in one step of analysis. Throughout the paper, I use a psycholinguistic data set to compare the different statistical methods.
In this article we (re) consider how animacy, a conceptual property of referents, affects word order. It is commonly assumed that animacy effects arise during conceptualization, taken broadly to include processing at a mental model level. The order in which referents are conceptualized can directly affect word order. That is, animates tend to surface in the initial position in sentences, regardless whether or not it is a subject position. There is, however, some indication that animacy and thematic role interact under certain task conditions (e.g. Ferreira 1994). We suggest that such interactions occur when speakers change the time course of referent processing to reduce the processing workload during the upcoming utterance. When they compact preutterance planning sufficiently, for example, by overlapping processing of referents, they can cram in more processing with minimal lengthening of planning time. But this overlap facilitates an interaction of referent information that does not occur with more sequential planning. We present data from three German picture description experiments that, taken together, support this account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Theories of sentence production based on speech errors divide lexical-syntactic integration processes into 2 components. The first involves formulating an abstract structural representation that includes semantically specified lexical items. The second involves placing phonologically specified content words into a syntactic frame whose configuration is determined by the initial structural representation. Syntactic form thus may be influenced directly by variations in the semantic processing of words, but not by variations in phonological processing. This hypothesis was tested and supported in 2 experiments with a total of 160 undergraduates who produced extemporaneous picture descriptions. Production of each description was preceded by the presentation of a priming word that was semantically or phonologically related to a target word likely to occur in the description. Semantically primed targets tended to appear as the Ss of active and passive sentences, whereas the same targets when they were not primed were more likely to appear as the objects. Phonological priming, although equal to semantic priming in ability to elicit the target words, was not reliably related to syntactic form. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It is widely acknowledged that characteristics of the general information-processing system in which sentence formulation occurs may provide constraints on syntax in language use. The author proposes one possible source of such constraints. Evidence is reviewed indicating that the syntax of sentences may to some degree reflect the transient processing demands of lexical retrieval, suggesting an interaction between syntactic and lexical processing. Specifically, the syntactic structure of utterances appears to be sensitive to the accessibility of lexical information, with phrases containing more accessible information occurring earlier in sentences. The existence of such an interaction argues that the utterance formulation system is not strictly hierarchical, as most current approaches to sentence production imply. A broad framework for models of production is outlined that incorporates these interactions within a limited-capacity processing system. This framework also permits a resolution of contradictions in the literature on pragmatic determinants of constitutional order in adult language use. (6 p ref)
A computer simulation model of the human speaker is presented which generates sentences in a piecemeal way. The module responsible for Grammatical Encoding (the tactical component) is discussed in detail. Generation is conceptually and lexically guided and may proceed from the bottom of the syntactic structure upwards as well as from the top downwards. The construction of syntactic structures is based on unification of so-called syntactic segments.
Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to acquire and adapt sequencing mechanisms and (b) meaning-form mappings to derive syntactic representations. The model is able to account for most of what is known about structural priming in adult speakers, as well as key findings in preferential looking and elicited production studies of language acquisition. The model suggests how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced in the development and use of syntax.
Statistical approaches to overdispersion, correlated errors, shrinkage estimation, and smoothing of regression relationships may be encompassed within the framework of the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). Given an unobserved vector of random effects, observations are assumed to be conditionally independent with means that depend on the linear predictor through a specified link function and conditional variances that are specified by a variance function, known prior weights and a scale factor. The random effects are assumed to be normally distributed with mean zero and dispersion matrix depending on unknown variance components. For problems involving time series, spatial aggregation and smoothing, the dispersion may be specified in terms of a rank deficient inverse covariance matrix. Approximation of the marginal quasi-likelihood using Laplace's method leads eventually to estimating equations based on penalized quasilikelihood or PQL for the mean parameters and pseudo-likelihood for the variances. Im...
Statistical approaches to overdispersion, correlated errors, shrinkage estimation, and smoothing of regression relationships may be encompassed within the framework of the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). Given an unobserved vector of random effects, observations are assumed to be conditionally independent with means that depend on the linear predictor through a specified link function and conditional variances that are specified by a variance function, known prior weights and a scale factor. The random effects are assumed to be normally distributed with mean zero and dispersion matrix depending on unknown variance components. For problems involving time series, spatial aggregation and smoothing, the dispersion may be specified in terms of a rank deficient inverse covariance matrix. Approximation of the marginal quasi-likelihood using Laplace's method leads eventually to estimating equations based on penalized quasilikelihood or PQL for the mean parameters and pseudo-likelihood for the variances. Implementation involves repeated calls to normal theory procedures for REML estimation in variance components problems. By means of informal mathematical arguments, simulations and a series of worked examples, we conclude that PQL is of practical value for approximate inference on parameters and realizations of random effects in the hierarchical model. The applications cover overdispersion in binomial proportions of seed germination; longitudinal analysis of attack rates in epilepsy patients; smoothing of birth cohort effects in an age-cohort model of breast cancer incidence; evaluation of curvature of birth cohort effects in a case-control study of childhood cancer and obstetric radiation; spatial aggregation of lip cancer rates in Scottish counties; and the success of salamander matings in a complicated experiment involving crossing of male and female effects. PQL tends to underestimate somewhat the variance components and (in absolute value) fixed effects when applied to clustered binary data, but the situation improves rapidly for binomial observations having denominators greater than one.
Statistical analysis is a useful skill for linguists and psycholinguists, allowing them to understand the quantitative structure of their data. This textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the statistical analysis of language. Designed for linguists with a non-mathematical background, it clearly introduces the basic principles and methods of statistical analysis, using ’R’, the leading computational statistics programme. The reader is guided step-by-step through a range of real data sets, allowing them to analyse acoustic data, construct grammatical trees for a variety of languages, quantify register variation in corpus linguistics, and measure experimental data using state-of-the-art models. The visualization of data plays a key role, both in the initial stages of data exploration and later on when the reader is encouraged to criticize various models. Containing over 40 exercises with model answers, this book will be welcomed by all linguists wishing to learn more about working with and presenting quantitative data.
Methodological problems have been a longstanding barrier to the systematic exploration of issues in language production. Recently, however, production research has broadened beyond traditional observational approaches to include a diverse set of experimental paradigms. This review surveys the observational and experimental methods that are used to study production, the questions to which the methods have been directed, and the theoretical assumptions that the methods embody. Although tailored to the investigation of language production, most of the methods are closely related to others that are widely employed in cognitive research. The common denominator of these procedures is verbal responding. Because the processing complexities of verbal responses are sometimes overlooked in research on memory, perception, attention, and language comprehension, the methodological assumptions of production research have implications for other experimental procedures that are used to elicit spoken words or sentences.
This article compares the predictions of two models of grammatical encoding in language production. The basis of one model is that alternative syntactic structures compete to determine which structure is eventually used. The second model is incremental: Utterances are gradually built up, and the structure emerges from the construction process itself. If grammatical encoding is competitive, syntactic choices should pose difficulties; if incremental, syntactic choices should ease the creation of speech. These predictions were tested in three experiments where speakers created utterances which sometimes required a syntactic decision. When constructing a sentence allowed a syntactic choice, speakers generally constructed that utterance with fewer errors and more quickly. This finding supports the notion that language production operates incrementally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This chapter presents an analysis of sentence production, by distinguishing between the general problem of language production, which must include message formulation, and the specific problem of sentence production, which may be viewed as translation process. The chapter assumes that somewhere in the recesses of the central nervous system, an interaction takes place among the current motor and perceptual experiences, stored information, motivational systems, and various other variables. This interaction gives rise to a communicative intention, also termed as message. This message has to be translated into a set of instructions sufficient to guide the articulatory apparatus. The final point that should be made from the analysis of sentence production is that even if one to has good evidence about the vocabulary of the computational system that mediates the translation from messages into their realization as instructions to the articulatory system, one would still be unsatisfied. The reason of this dissatisfaction is that one would want to be able to characterize the information flow in the system in terms of interactions between the various structural types represented in the computational vocabulary.
We present two experiments that examine how prior discourse context, and in particular the relative salience of different pieces of information, influences the syntactic structure that a speaker assigns to a subsequent utterance. In a picture description task in two languages (English and Spanish), speakers produced syntactic structures that allowed an entity made salient by a preceding discourse to precede a nonsalient entity. This tendency was stronger when the salient entity was animate than when it was inanimate. We suggest that when discourse makes one entity more salient than another, it temporarily makes that entity more accessible. We propose that such derived accessibility is additive to an entity's inherent accessibility, which is determined by its intrinsic semantic features. We discuss this approach in the light of previous work which emphasizes the importance of information accessibility in syntactic processing (e.g., Bock & Irwin, 1980; Bock & Warren, 1985; McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993; Osgood, 1971; Sridhar, 1988).
In four experiments using preschool children, congruence between reference fields and name order in a miniature artificial language (MAL) was studied. In Experiment 1 the subjects learned names for two horses and two carts, and subsequently tried to learn an MAL using the names presented either in the horse-cart order or in reverse order (cart before horse). The former was more easily learned. In Experiment 2 the possible influence of spatial position and animacy in producing the effect was examined by using toy graders and toy boulders, with the former pushing the latter. Name order which represented grader plus boulder was more easily learned than the reverse (boulder name followed by grader name), suggesting that a property such as agency determines ease of acquisition. Experiments 3 and 4 repeated the first two, but using Fijian children. Fijian languages are considered to be subject-final. The patterns of results were the same as for English-speaking children, indicating that the effects are not dependent upon knowing English, a subject-initial language. The results are discussed in terms of possible semantic bases of word ordering, and are seen as giving support to a “naturalness” position, which asserts that it is appropriate to refer first to agents, then patients. They are also seen as contributing to the debate on whether semantically based word combinations in early language acquisition might serve as a device assisting entry to fully syntactic forms.
This paper investigates the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. It was hypothesized that alternative surface structures are used differentially in order to array the information in sentences with given information preceding new information. This hypothesis was supported in a question-answering task. Results showed that answers to questions retained the syntactic structure and the order of given and new information from previously presented sentences when the original sentences placed given before new information. However, when the original sentence positioned new information before given, and alternative syntactic form was used and the order of information was reversed in subjects' answers.
Two experiments investigated sentence production processes underlying the tendency for given information to precede new information in a sentence. The factors hypothesized to contribute to this effect were referential availability and lexical availability. Experiment 1 found that information coreferential with an antecedent referring expression tended to occur earlier in produced sentences than new information. This effect was more pronounced when the information was lexically identical to its antecedent. Experiment 2 found lexical availability effects when referential functions were minimized. These results may be accounted for by assuming that both referential availability and lexical availability contribute to the speed of lexicalization processes in sentence production, and that the order in which constituents become available after lexicalization influences surface syntactic organization processes.
Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these biases have focused on processing factors. This paper presents a learning-based account of these word order biases in the form of a connectionist model of syntax acquisition that can learn the distinct grammatical properties of English and Japanese while, at the same time, accounting for the cross-linguistic variability in processing biases in sentence production. This account demonstrates that the incremental nature of sentence processing can have an important effect on the representations that are learned in different languages.
This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he or she is going to express in that sentence. Apparently, the speaker is able to build up a syntactically coherent utterance out of a series of syntactic fragments each rendering a new part of the meaning content. This incremental, left‐to‐right mode of sentence production is the central capability of the proposed Incremental Procedural Grammar (IPG). Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, self‐repairs, and language pathology, are accounted for as well.
The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions which are in line with current theories of grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistics rules is proposed.
The basic design feature of IPG which gives rise to these psychologically and linguistically desirable properties, is the “Procedures + Stack” concept. Sentences are built not by a central constructing agency which overlooks the whole process but by a team of syntactic procedures (modules) which work—in parallel—on small parts of the sentence, have only a limited overview, and whose sole communication channel is a stack.
IPG covers object complement constructions, interrogatives, and word order in main and subordinate clauses. It handles unbounded dependencies, crossserial dependencies and coordination phenomena such as gapping and conjunction reduction. It is also capable of generating self‐repairs and elliptical answers to questions. IPG has been implemented as an incremental Dutch sentence generator written in LISP.
Three studies explored relationships between prototypicality and the structure of sentences in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The first experiment showed that sentences were systematically changed in recall to allow prototypical instances of categories to be mentioned before nonprototypical instances. In the second experiment, sentences in which the prototype preceded the nonprototype were judged more natural than sentences with the opposite order. Finally, an examination of dictionary definitions of categories found that prototypes tended to occur before nonprototypes. These results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. Such processes appear to adjust serial positions and, to a lesser extent, grammatical roles in order to allow lexical items to be produced soon after they are retrieved.
Telling time is an exercise in coordinating language production with visual perception. By coupling different ways of saying times with different ways of seeing them, the performance of time-telling can be used to track cognitive transformations from visual to verbal information in connected speech. To accomplish this, we used eyetracking measures along with measures of speech timing during the production of time expressions. Our findings suggest that an effective interface between what has been seen and what is to be said can be constructed within 300 ms. This interface underpins a preverbal plan or message that appears to guide a comparatively slow, strongly incremental formulation of phrases. The results begin to trace the divide between seeing and saying—or thinking and speaking—that must be bridged during the creation of even the most prosaic utterances of a language.
Spoken connected discourse was interrupted for testing immediate recall where the speech just presented contained an identical sequence of words in one of two syntactic configurations. The clause unit previous to the one interrupted either belonged to the immediate sentence, or was part of the previous sentence. The Ss listening to the speech either wrote down as much as they could remember from just before each test pause (Experiment I), or wrote only after the first word of the identical sequences given as prompts (Experiment II). Various verbatim measures of recall support only the immediate sentence and immediately heard clause as retrievable units in memory. A psycholinguistic model of listening incorporating these results is discussed.
Verbatim short-term memory for a sentence has been taken as evidence for a surface representation different from the conceptual representation characteristic of longer-term memory. In seven experiments we investigated an alternative hypothesis: that immediate recall involves regeneration of the sentence from a conceptual representation, using words that have been recently activated. A key claim is that the activated lexical items are unordered. To test this hypothesis, a synonym of a word in the sentence was presented in a secondary task before or after the sentence, prior to recall. As predicted, these lure words were intruded frequently (Experiments 1 and 2), but only when supported by the meaning of the whole sentence (Experiments 3 and 4). In Experiment 5 as high an intrusion rate was obtained for sentences read in RSVP at 100 ms per word as at the 200 ms rate of the other experiments. Experiment 6 showed that listeners make even more lure-based intrusions than readers. In Experiment 7 4-year-old children made intrusions similar to those of adults. The results support the hypothesis that a sentence is regenerated in immediate recall from a representation of its meaning, using recently activated words. Only when the right set of words is active will recall be “verbatim.”
In four experiments, subjects were presented with two nouns and a verb and asked to construct a sentence. The primary manipulation was whether the verb was "normal" (agent-theme or experiencer-theme, such as AVOIDED) or theme-experiencer (e.g., CHALLENGED), and the dependent measure was the syntactic form of the sentence (and, secondarily, the time to formulate the sentence). The experiments demonstrated that passives occur more frequently with theme-experiencer verbs than with normal verbs, and passives occur more frequently when the two nouns differ in animacy rather than both being animate. In addition, passives took longer to formulate than actives. The results indicate that speakers attempt to place more prominent thematic roles (agent, experiencer) in the subject position of a sentence.
Linear mixed-effects models are an important class of statistical models that are used directly in many fields of applications and also are used as iterative steps in fitting other types of mixed-effects models, such as generalized linear mixed models. The parameters in these models are typically estimated by maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood. In general, there is no closed-form solution for these estimates and they must be determined by iterative algorithms such as EM iterations or general nonlinear optimization. Many of the intermediate calculations for such iterations have been expressed as generalized least squares problems. We show that an alternative representation as a penalized least squares problem has many advantageous computational properties including the ability to evaluate explicitly a profiled log-likelihood or log-restricted likelihood, the gradient and Hessian of this profiled objective, and an ECME update to refine this objective.
The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.
The grammatical relations of noun phrases in sentences are ordered in a hierarchy that is reflected in a wide array of linguistic phenomena. The hypothesis explored in this paper is that this hierarchy is related to the conceptual accessibility of the intended referents of noun phrases that commonly occur in particular relational roles, with relations higher in the hierarchy typically occupied by noun phrases representing more accessible concepts. An experiment on the formulation of sentences examined the relationship betweeen conceptual accessibility and grammatical relations for three levels in the hierarchy, the subject, direct object, and indirect object. There was a strong and systematic influence of conceptual accessibility on the surface syntactic structure of sentences. The attribution of this effect to grammatical role assignments, rather than to serial ordering mechanisms, was supported by the absence of an effect of conceptual accessibility on the order of nouns in conjunctive noun phrases. This pattern of results can be explained within current theories of sentence production.
Animacy, word length, and prosody have all been accorded prominent roles in explanations for word order variations in language use. We examined the sequencing effects of these factors in two types of tasks. In recall tasks designed to simulate language production, we found selective effects of animacy. Animate nouns tended to appear as subjects in transitive sentences, but showed no special affinity for initial position in conjunctions within sentences, but showed no special affinity for initial position in conjunctions within sentences, suggesting a stronger involvement of animacy in grammatical role assignment than in word ordering. Word length had no significant impact: Shorter words did not appear earlier than longer words within sentences or within isolated conjunctions of nouns. Prosody had a weak effect on word order in isolated conjunctions, favoring sequences with alternating rhythm, but only in the absence of an animacy contrast. These results tend to confirm a hypothesized role for conceptual (meaning-based) accessibility in grammatical role assignment and to disconfirm a hypothesized role for lexical (form-based) accessibility in word ordering. In a judgment task, forms with animate nouns early were preferred across all constructions, and forms with short words early were often preferred both in sentences and in conjunctions. The findings suggest a possible asymmetry between comprehension and production in functional accounts of word order variations.
Across many languages, speakers tend to produce sentences so that given (previously referred to) arguments are mentioned before new arguments; this is termed given-new ordering. We explored the nature of such given-new effects in Japanese using a procedure following Bock and Irwin (1980). Speakers encoded and then recalled canonical (e.g., okusan-ga otetsudaisan-ni purezento-o okutta, "the housewife gave the housekeeper a present") or scrambled (okusan-ga purezento-o otetsudaisan-ni okutta) dative targets when prompted by a statement-question sequence. The prompting statement established one nonsubject argument of the dative target as given, leaving the other nonsubject argument as new. Previous mention was either with lexically identical content (e.g., otetsudaisan or purezento) or with lexically distinct but nearly synonymous content (meidosan, "housemaid" or okurimono, "gift"). Results showed that speakers produced canonical or scrambled word orders so that given arguments were mentioned before new, but especially when the previous mention of the given argument occurred with lexically identical content (replicating Bock and Irwin's English effect). These results show that the production of Japanese scrambled and canonical word orders is sensitive to given versus new status (as in English), implying that given-new ordering arises at the stage of sentence production where scrambling effects are realized.
The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data obtained from the sentence production experiment reported here are thus relevant to production in a heretofore unexamined language. Moreover, the data inform broader theoretical issues, such as the extent to which sentence production can be considered as an incremental process, and the interaction of the various factors affecting conceptual accessibility. In addition, the study stands as evidence that experimental psycholinguistic research can and should be carried out in typologically diverse languages.
Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase--a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.