(A Few) Psycholinguistic Properties of NPs

J. CARLOS ACUÑA-FARIÑAUNIVERSITY OF SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

http://www.carlosacunafarina.com/

STORING

X

COMPUTING

X

MORPHOLOGY

X

DIRECTION OF ENCODING

X

OPPORTUNISM

OUTLINE1. Are NPs shy?

2. Nominal features in comprehension

Morphology

3. Nominal features in production

Morphology

4. Opportunistic biasses

Direction of encoding

5. Adjunction

6. Epilogue

1. Are NPs shy?

1. Are NPs shy?

Formal features:

case, arbitrary gender morphology

Semantic features:

number, animacy, etc direction of encoding

Formal/semantic?: arbitrary gender, biological gender, number …

INTERACTIONS

WHERE TO LOOK?

a. Agreement: copying or unification of nominal features. Which features get copied or unified?

(b. Adjunction).

2. Nominal features in Comprehension: Gender and

Number

Greenberg’s (1963) universals 36, 37, and 45, for instance).

Feature Hierarchy: Person > Number > Gender

Number is inherent to nouns (Booij 1996)

Singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural.

Women, fire and dangerous things: Corbett, 1991:148; see his discussion of Fula’s 20 genders, for instance; pp. 190 ff.

Psycholinguistic evidence for feature differentiality

(1) a. The ballerina told the skier that the doctor would blame him for the injury.

b. The ballerina told the skier that the doctor would blame her for the injury

(2) a. The landlord told the janitors that the fireman with the gas-mask would protect him from getting hurt.

b. The landlord told the janitors that the fireman with the gas-mask would protect them from getting hurt.

Nicol (1988)Cross-modal priming

(3) Quando Maria cerca Roberto, (pro) diventa

ansiosa.

‘When Maria looks for Roberto, she becomes anxious’.

(4) Quando Maria cerca Roberto, (pro) diventa

ansioso.

‘When Maria looks for Roberto, he becomes anxious’.

(5) Quando Maria lo cerca, (pro) diventa ansioso.

‘When Maria looks for him, he becomes anxious’.

(6) Quando i Rossi lo cercano, (pro) diventa ansioso.

‘When The Rossi look for him, he becomes anxious

Carminatti (2005): the Feature Hierarchy Hypothesis

Against the FHH: E.R.P.s.

Molinaro et al. (2012: 915)

Against the FHH: ERPs. Barber and Carreiras (2005):

(4)

Gender Violation Number violation

*Arroyo helada *Arroyo helados

Frozen (fem) stream (masc) Frozen (pl) stream (sg)

Gender violation Number violation

*La lago *Los lago

 The (fem) stream (masc) The (pl) stream (sg)

124

105

86

25

37

60

__ Agreement

__ Number disagreement

__ Gender disagreement

300 500 700

-5 µV

ms

124

105

86

25

37

60

Beginning Middle

Barber & Carreiras, JoCN,2005

No differences up to 700 ms

Different representational loci

But same use in processing

Against the FHH: ERPs.

Barber et al. (2004):

(5)

a. *el faro luminosa /‘the luminous (fem) lighthouse (masc)’

b. *el abuelo delgada /‘the thin (fem) grandfather’ (masc)’

Hagoort & Brown (1999), Dutch; Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers (2000), German; Deutsch & Bentin (2001), Hebrew.

SO:

When gender and number features ‘crash’ as a result of a break in the alliterative, inflectionally-expressed sequence, ERP researchers register the typical morphosyntactically-oriented LAN effect (Kutas & Hillyard 1984; Osterhout & Mobley 1995; Munte et al., 1997a, 1997b; Friederici 2002; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky 2006; Kutas & Federmeier 2009; among others). However, that effect is much harder to obtain when the crashing is not inflectionally obvious. Independently of representational grounding.

STORING

x

COMPUTING

THE MORPHOLOGY

(6)

Il PERSONAGGIO [Masc]...Lui Agreement

The character [Masc]... he

Il PERSONAGGIO [Masc]]...Lei Disagreement

The character [Masc] ...she

L’erede ......Lei (Lui) Baseline

The heir.....she (he)

Cacciari et al. (1997, 2011)

Epicenes

Reading times

The Feature Mismatch effect … in English

(7) a. gender match:

When he was at the party, the boy cruelly teased the girl during the party games.

b. gender mismatch:

When he was at the party, the girl teased the boy during the party games.

c. control:

When I was at the party, the boy cruelly teased the girl during the party games.

Van Gompel & Liversedge (2003)

cruelly

SO: NOMINAL FEATURES IN COMPREHENSION

STORING

X

COMPUTING

X

MORPHOLOGY

3. NOMINAL FEATURES IN PRODUCTION

Proximity concord

(a) The flag on the balconies … (IS LARGE)

(b) The flag on the balconies … (*ARE LARGE)

(8a) *The illiteracy level of our children ARE appalling.

(George Bush, Washington, 23 January 2004)

(8b) Our work is based on the assumption that some key notions of formal syntax, such as intermediate traces, IS directly reflected in processing/memory constraints at play in on-line language production. (Franck, Soare, Frauenfelder & Rizzi (2010: 3)

(8c) … the relation of more oblique arguments to the predicate ARE less obvious than those of the central … arguments. (Croft 1988: 169)

(8d) … the nature of the processes that underlie this task ARE complex. (Gillespie & Pearlmutter 2011: 377)

(Bock & Miller 1991; Bock & Cutting 1992; Bock, Cutting & Eberhard 1992; and Bock & Eberhard 1993; Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996; Vigliocco & Franck 1999, 2001; Hartsuiker et al. 2001: Eberhard et al. 2005; Franck et al. 2006, 2008, 2010; Haskell et al. 2010; Bock et al. 2011; Acuña-Fariña 2012; inter alia)

NOMINAL FEATURES OF FORM

1. Asymmetry: SG + PL (markedness).

2. Regulars (boys) and irregulars (men) attract approximately the same.

3. Boys more than scissors or suds

4. Army or fleet do not attract whereas soldiers or ships do.

(Bock & Miller 1991; Bock & Eberhard 1993; Nicol et al. 1996; Eberhard 1997; Acuña-Fariña 2012, inter alia).

NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING:

1. Distributivity (Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996; Eberhard 1997; Bock et al. 2004, 2011; etc.)

(9) The flag on the balconies

(10) The box for the rings

NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING: CONCRETENESS

Spanish results English results

A comparison between English and Spanish showed a significant interaction between Language and Abstraction (F1(1, 100)= 53.19; p<.001; F2(1, 28)= 24.41; p<.001): concreteness seems to have a more powerful effect in English than in Spanish. Riveiro Outeiral, Ph. Diss.

27

SO: THE MORPHOLOGY … again …?

The role of morphology

gs

Lorimor et al. 2008

Lorimor et al, 2008

Susceptibility to distributivity

Foote & Bock (2012)

Distributive Non distributive

Mexican .17 .04

Dominican .31 .06

English .26 .03

Leuven NP Cfr 2013

Andalusian Spanish

Andalusian Spanish (29 subjects; south; eroded morphology):

Distributive sentences: 84 mistakes (19.4%)

Non-distributive sentences: 14 mistakes (3.2%)

Galician Spanish (30 subjects; north; full morphology):

Distributive sentences: 41 (9.8%)

Non-distributive sentences: 13 (3.1%)

However, more than Morphology: Epicenes again

Vigliocco & Hartsuiker (2001):

(11)

Un camion ha investito Fabio/Fabiola che correva in bicicletta ascoltando musica

[‘A truck hit Fabio/Fabiola who was riding a bike while listening to music’]

La vittima dello scontro … distratto/distratta [distracted-masc/distracted-fem]

[‘The victim of the accident … distracted’]

If the discourse information concerning the sex of the referent is taken into account in the encoding of subject-predicative adjective agreement, errors in gender agreement should be less common in the congruent than in the incongruent condition.

This is precisely what they found: a statistically significant semantic effect with the same nouns for which no such effects could be found in a series of comprehension experiments (remember: Cacciari et al. 1997, 2011).

SO: NOMINAL FEATURES IN COMPREHENSION

STORING

X

COMPUTING

X

MORPHOLOGY

X

DIRECTION OF ENCODING

Interim summary

1. Nominal features are recruited to do the same job, regardless of their representational origin.

2. But morphology interacts with feature strength,

3. and with the direction of encoding: form is priviledged in comprehension especially in alliterative languages (epicenes in Italian vs cataphora in English); meaning leaks more freely in production especially in the poor inflection languages (more distributivity in English than in the Romance languages, German, Russian and Slovak, etc.)

4. OPPORTUNISM

DETERMINER PRODUCTION

how determiner selection might differ from open-class word selection across languages

 

the picture-word interference task, a variant of the classical Stroop task (Klein 1964; for a review see McLeod 1991)

The semantic interference effect and the phonological facilitation effect.

Slower Faster

Assumed to reflect processes at different levels of lexical access. competition at the level of lexical node selection vs priming of the phonological content of the lexical node selected for production.

CARBAR

DETERMINER PRODUCTION

Schriefers (1993; also Schriefers, Jescheniak & Hantsch 2002, 2005) asked Dutch speakers to produce NPs (e.g., "the red table") in response to colored pictures. In Dutch, determiners are marked for gender: de is used for common (com) gender nouns (e.g., de tafel, ‘the table’, com), and het is used for neuter (neu) gender nouns (e.g., het boek, ‘the book’, neu). Thus, speakers would produce either a de+Adj+ N phrase or a het+Adj+N phrase.

Naming latencies were longer when targets and distractors had different gender: Gender Congruency Effect.

A competitive process that is dependent on its relative level of activation and is not simply an automatic consequence of selecting a lexical node.

However,

(12)

a. Il treno/i treni [the train/the trains]

b. Lo sgabello/gli sgabelli [the stool/the stools]

c. La forchetta/le forchette [the fork/the forks]

d. Il piccolo treno [the small train]

e. Il piccolo sgabello [the small stool]

f. La piccola forchetta [the small fork]

g. Il treno piccolo [literally, the train small]

h. Lo sgabello piccolo [literally, the stool small]

i. La forchetta piccola [literally, the fork small]

the determiners lo/gli are selected if the next word starts with a vowel, with a consonant cluster of the form "s+consonant" or "gn", or with an affricate;

the determiners il/i are selected for all the remaining cases.

Since Italian allows adjectives to occupy both prenominal and postnominal NP positions, the relevant phonological context for determiner selection is not specified until the major constituents of the phrase are ordered.

Compare:

lo sgabello / il piccolo sgabello / lo sgabello piccolo.

Two related implications:

1. the selection of a determiner form is based on a mixture of phrasal (number), lexical (gender), and phonological features.

2. determiner selection occurs very late in the process of NP production, the point at which the phonological forms of the noun and adjectives are ordered and inserted into a phonological phrase.

RESULT?the picture-word interference task …

Caramazza et al. (2001):

Italian, Spanish, French.

NO GENDER CONGRUENCY EFFECT.

Late selection languages (Italian, Spanish,and French):

Determiners are selected so late in the production process that the activation of potentially competing information has long dissipated and hence cannot interfere with the selection of the target determiner (see Miozzo & Caramazza 1999)

SO: NOMINAL FEATURES

STORING

X

COMPUTING

X

MORPHOLOGY

X

DIRECTION OF ENCODING

X

OPPORTUNISM

5. NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING IN ADJUNCTION

(13) Somebody shot the servant of the actress who was on the

balcony

Who shot who? Someone shot the actress’ servant

Who was on the balcony? ???

ADJUNTION (SYNTACTIC) AMBIGUITY

How do we solve ambiguity problems? Attachment strategies

CNP

DET NOM

the N1 PP

servant PREP NP

of DET N2

RC

who was on the balcony

actressthe

Early closure

Late closure

Features of meaning in adjunction: ANIMACY in DUTCH

Desmet, Brysbaert, & DeBaecke (2002): COMPLETION

Desmet, DeBaecke, Drieghe, Brysbaert, & Vonk (2006): COMPREHENSION

A strong propensity to attach the RC high to the first NP when this coded an animate referent.

A fine grain of analysis: lexical properties of the nouns composing a syntactic structure have a role in shaping adjunction preferences,

Desmet et al., (2006) confirmed the role of animacy and extended their research to the concrete/abstract distinction: when the first noun was both animate and concrete (daughter, boy, girl) as opposed to animate and abstract (government, staff, committee and the like), RC attraction was strongest.

(14)The decisions of the president that …

The documents of the president that ….The organizations of the president that …

The advisors of the president that ….

Acuña-Fariña et al., (2009): A-A, A-I, I-A, and I-I

(corpus +self-paced reading)

NP1 bias except in I-A condition

But:

MUCH STRONGER IN CORPUS

So:1. The semantics of the lexical pieces in the CNP counts (for adjunction!!!!!!!).

2. It counts more in production (the corpus)

(also in the comparison of Desmet et al. (2002; completion) vs Desmet (2006; reading))

Current research project: emotionality

According to the bidimensional perspective of emotion (Lang, 1995), the affective spectrum is determined by two

different dimensions, namely affective valence

(ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (from complete calmness to excitement). Thus, words can be classified according to these two dimensions.

ove

Theory

Peace

Death

Love

Theory

EMOTIONAL WORDS IN ISOLATION

Emotional words tend to capture attentional resources relative to neutral words, in such a way that they interfere with online cognitive tasks (Anderson, 2005; Dresler, Mériau, Heekeren, & Van der Meer 2009; Pratto & John, 1991)

Emotional words affect performance in typical psycholinguistic tasks, such as lexical decision (e.g., Carretié et al., 2008) and naming (De Houwer & Randell, 2004; Hermans, de Houwer & Eelen, 2001; Spruyt, Hermans, de Houwer, Vandekerckhove, & Eelen, 2007).

Do emotional nouns affect tree

geometries?

(even though attachment per se is a syntactic process in nature, the attachment of RCs in particular may be “partly nonsyntactic”, since the relative pronoun is subject to binding conditions that relate it to a referential antecedent. Binding is subject to topical visibility (Hemforth, Konieczny, & Scheepers, 2000; Hemforth, Konieczny, Seelig, et al., 2000), and this is obviously sensitive to lexical salience).

N-N P-N N-P0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

74

85

39

26

15

76NP1NP2

c

Pe

rce

nta

ge

of

NP

1 a

nd

NP

2

ele

cti

on

s

Fraga et al., 2012

Completion: valence

So:

Very strong results: default NP1 preference of Spanish (Carreiras & Clifton 1993, 1999; Carreiras, Salillas & Barber 2004) simply obliterated.

But: Comprehension. ERPs (agreement again)

Fraga, Díaz-Lago & Acuña-Fariña (2012)

Participants Sixteen university students : 5 men and 11 women.

Mean age: 21.50 ± 3.29 years. Mother tongue: Spanish. Handedness dominance: all of them right-handed.

Design and variables

IVs: Grammaticality (gender match vs. gender mismatch) and Emotionality (neutral vs. emotional)

DVs: Amplitude (µV) and Latency (ms).

(15)

Match-neutral : Elena colocó la mesa cuadrada en el centro del salón

‘Elena put the square(fem) table(fem) in the middle of the living-room’.

Mismatch-neutral : Elena colocó la mesa cuadrado en el centro del salón

‘Elena put the square(masc) table(fem) in the middle of the living-room’

Match-pleasant : La joven se comió una hamburguesa tierna con patatas

‘The young girl ate a tender(fem) burger(fem) with fries’.

Mismatch-pleasant : “La joven se comió una hamburguesa tierno con patatas”

‘The young girl ate a tender(masc) burger(fem) with fries’

OPPORTUNISM/ENCODING … again …

NO EFFECTS

SO: PROCESSING NOMINAL FEATURES IN ADJUNCTION

(MORPHOLOGY)

X

OPPORTUNISM

X

DIRECTION OF ENCODING

EPILOGUE(16)

O … o … 0 vs a …a …a

Il piccolo treno la piccola forchetta

“the guiding intuition that redundancy in computational structure is a hint of error has proven to be productive and often verified” (Chomsky 2005: 10; emphasis added)

Jackendoff (2011: 6; home page version)

“(…) if redundancy is characteristic of the brain, this changes the desiderata for linguistic theory: one should not necessarily be trying to squeeze all the redundancy out of linguistic representations and linguistic processing (…). So a biolinguistic approach that took graceful integration seriously might well not try to reduce either of them to a single underlying mechanism, as would be dictated by considerations of nonredundant (or “perfect”) computation” (emphasis added).

“(…) unlike a derivational formalism, a constraint-based formalism lends itself to a direct relation to theories of processing. The current consensus on sentence processing is that it is deeply “incremental” or “opportunistic”: the processor uses whatever information is available at the moment, whether from phonology, syntax, semantics, or discourse or visual context, to build hypotheses about what is to come in the sentence and the sentence’s likely interpretation (…) a constraint-based grammar is ideally suited to this sort of processing, because constraints have no inherent directionality and no inherent ordering. They can be applied starting in phonology, moving through syntax to semantics, as in language perception, or the other way round, as in language production; they can be applied left to right, top down, or bottom up, depending on circumstance”. (p. 17, emphasis added).

1. Features ‘crash’ in the same way, regardless of representational grounding (‘interpretability’): ERPs.

They are attended to to a degree that is sensitive to morphological richness, but this is necessarily gradient: ERPs, epicenes in Italian vs the Feature Mismatch Effect in English.

They behave slightly differently in comprehension and production: semantic interference (‘leaking’) is stronger in the latter: distributivity, concreteness effects; epicenes in Italian.

Opportunistic access to info: no waiting for ‘perfect design’ or ‘perfect order’: determiner production in Dutch vs Italian, Spanish, French (the Gender Congruency Effect).

HINT OF ERROR??????

MULTIPLE SOFT CONSTRAINTS CUM GRACEFUL INTEGRATION ??????

And the Oscar goes to ….

Jackendoff!

(I think)

THANK YOU VERY MUCH