the role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participants
Post on 15-Sep-2016
213 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l
The role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participantsq
Kathy Conklin,a,* Jean-Pierre Koenig,a and Gail Maunerb
a Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1030, USAb Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1030, USA
Accepted 3 December 2003
Available online 23 January 2004
Abstract
In addition to information about phonology, morphology and syntax, lexical entries contain semantic information about par-
ticipants (e.g., Agent). However, the traditional criteria for determining how much participant information is lexically encoded have
proved unreliable. We have proposed two semantic criteria (obligatoriness and selectivity) that jointly identify the participants that
are lexically encoded in verbs. We tested whether one of these criteria, semantic selectivity, makes psychologically real distinctions
between participant information that is lexically encoded and participant information that is not. We examined how readers in-
tegrated syntactically optional WH-constituents in filler-gap sentences when the participant information conveyed by the WH-filler
was specific to a restricted class of verbs (i.e., source locations) and when it was not (i.e., event locations). Our results provide support
for the role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participant information of syntactically optional constituents.
� 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Argument structure; Argument; Adjunct; Verb; Filler-gap sentences; Semantics; Source location; Event location; Lexical encoding;
Sentence processing
1. Introduction
In order to understand a sentence a reader must de-
cide what event is described by the sentence, what en-
tities are participating in the event, and what role each
of the participants plays in the event. Many researchers
believe that some participant roles are lexically encoded
in the mental representations of verbs while others are
not. However determining which participant roles are
lexically encoded and the factors that affect their en-coding has proved to be problematic.
qThis research was supported by research Grant No. 1 R01
MH60133-01 from the National Institute for Mental Health, National
Institutes of Health. We gratefully acknowledge Amanda Haimson
and Eugene Lubliner for their work on the Source verb corpora project
and data collection, Yuki Sugiyama and Sunfa Kim for their assistance
in tabulating the location PP co-occurence data, and Craig Colder for
statistical advice. The stimulus materials for this study are available
from the authors.* Corresponding author. Fax: +716-645-3825.
E-mail addresses: conklin2@acsu.buffalo.edu (K. Conklin),
jpkoenig@acsu.buffalo.edu (J.-P. Koenig), mauner@acsu.buffalo.edu
(G. Mauner).
0093-934X/$ - see front matter � 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00435-8
In this paper, we focus on two factors that we argue
influence the lexical encoding of participant informationin the mental representation of verbs. We suggest that
the two semantic criteria, semantic obligatoriness and
selectivity, jointly identify which participants are lexi-
cally encoded in the Representation of verbs. In previ-
ous work, we have demonstrated that semantic
obligatoriness plays an important role in identifying
which participants are lexically encoded (Koenig,
Mauner, & Bienvenue, 2002a; Koenig, Mauner, & Bi-envenue, 2003). In the current work, we focus on whe-
ther a participant role must be specific to a verb or a
restricted class of verbs in order to be lexically encoded.
Traditionally, linguists believe that some participants,
for example Agents and Patients, are lexically encoded
while others are not. This is illustrated in (1), where the
participants associated with the NPs play particular
roles. Sentence (1a) describes a chasing event, in whichthe verb chase introduces two participants, an Agent,
dog, who does the chasing, and a Patient, cat, who gets
chased. These two participant roles appear to be nec-
essary to any chasing event. This is demonstrated by
222 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
the ungrammaticality of (1c) and (1d), in which theconstituents expressing the Agent or Patient roles are
omitted, as indicated by the asterisk (*). Now consider
the example sentence in (2), which is identical to the
sentence in (1a) with the exception of the presence of the
temporal adverbial phrase yesterday, which corresponds
to a Time role. Note that when this Time participant is
omitted, no ungrammaticality results. Participants that
are syntactically required have traditionally been cate-gorized as arguments. Many participants, like the Time
role expressed by yesterday, which are not syntactically
required, have been categorized as adjuncts. Crucially,
syntactically required participants, or arguments, are
thought to be encoded in the lexical-semantic represen-
tations of verbs. Thus both an Agent and Patient are
lexically encoded as arguments of the verb chase. In
contrast the Time role is not syntactically required andhas traditionally been identified as an adjunct.
(1) a. The dog chased the cat.
b. chase <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ dog,
Y¼Patient¼ cat.
c. *The dog chased.
d. *Chased the cat.
(2) The dog chased the cat (yesterday).
The distinction between what is lexically encoded andwhat is not, or what is an argument and what is an ad-
junct, has played an important role in the language sci-
ences. For example, in current linguistic frameworks the
projection of sentences is argued to reflect the argument
structures of verbs or sets of lexically encoded partici-
pants (e.g., Bresnan, 1982; Chomsky, 1981; Foley & Van
Valin, 1984; Pollard & Sag, 1987). This means that ar-
gument information that is included in the representationof lexical entries for verbs like chase drives the construc-
tion of clauses and in some theories of sentence processing
may in part drive sentence processing phenomena. Thus,
the syntactically required occurrence of the subject NP
dog and the direct objectNP cat in (1), and their respective
Agent and Patient roles, are assumed to stem from the
syntactic and/or semantic information associatedwith the
lexical representation of chase. More generally, thismeans that the syntactic structure of many sentences is
determined by information about participants included in
the lexical representation of verbs.
In the sentence processing literature, the distinction
between argument and adjunct has also been important.
The resolution of attachment ambiguities has been
found to be sensitive to the argument adjunct distinction
(Sch€utze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998; Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995). Additionally, lexically en-
coded argument information is predicted to be part of
our understanding of sentences even when it is not
syntactically expressed (Mauner & Koenig, 2000; Mau-
ner, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1995). The literature on the
processing of filler-gap sentences, which is pertinent to
the current study, has demonstrated that lexically en-
coded information is interpreted prior to encounteringsyntactic evidence for a gap (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, &
Garnsey, 1990; Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carl-
son, 1995). More recently, it has been demonstrated that
the processing of filler-gap sentences is also sensitive to
the distinction between arguments and adjuncts (Koenig
et al., 2003).
Despite the importance of the argument–adjunct
distinction to syntactic frameworks and on-line parsingand interpretation, there remains substantial uncertainty
about how to determine which constituents in a sentence
correspond to lexically encoded participants. Linguists
have developed some syntactic tests for determining
whether participants are lexically encoded in the mental
representations of a verb. However, many of the pro-
posed syntactic criteria for determining which partici-
pants of a verb are lexically encoded have proved to beproblematic (for a more complete discussion of syntactic
criteria see discussion in Koenig, Mauner, & Bienvenue,
2002b; Miller, 1997; Sch€utze, 1995; Vater, 1978).Because we are interested in comparing the process-
ing of different classes of syntactically optional constit-
uents in sentences whose verbs do not differ in their
syntactic subcategorization frames, syntactic criteria of
argumenthood are less relevant. We, therefore, take adifferent tack. We define lexically encoded information
as information that is highly activated upon recognition
of a verb and we rely on a purely semantic approach to
determine which syntactically optional constituents
correspond to lexically encoded participant role infor-
mation. We reserve the terms arguments and adjuncts to
cover this semantic distinction between participant role
information that is activated together with the situationdescribed by a verb and participant role information
which is not, respectively (see Koenig et al., 2002b, 2003,
for more details on the possible differences between our
semantic definition of argumenthood and more syntactic
definitions of arguments and adjuncts).
The usefulness of semantic criteria for determining
which participants are lexically encoded in the repre-
sentation of a verb is illustrated by the sentences in (3).In the sentence in (3a), the verb eat introduces an Agent,
Joe, who does the eating, and a Patient, pizza, that gets
eaten. However, the Patient of this sentence can be
omitted without making the sentence ungrammatical, as
illustrated in example (3b). Even though the Patient is
omitted in (3b), it still seems to be part of our under-
standing of the sentence. There is no eating event if
nothing is consumed. This suggests that a Patient par-ticipant is indeed required of an eating event. Evidence
for this possibility is provided by the sentence in (3c),
which is semantically anomalous, as indicated by the
hash mark (#). The second clause of sentence (3c),
which denies that something was eaten, results in a
contradiction, a standard test for semantic obligatori-
ness. Thus while the NP expressing the Patient role in
K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230 223
(3b) is syntactically optional and suggests that eat doesnot require a Patient, the results of the contradiction test
suggest that eat requires a Patient participant, which by
hypothesis is lexically encoded.
(3) a. Joe ate pizza. eat <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ Joe,
Y¼Patient¼ pizza
b. Joe ate. eat <X,Y>, where X¼Agent¼ Joe,
Y¼Patient¼ ?
c. #Joe ate, but he didn�t eat anything.The example in (3) demonstrates the usefulness of
semantic criteria in determining which participants are
candidates for lexical encoding. We have recently pro-
posed two semantic criteria which appear to affect the
lexical encoding of participant information, semantic
obligatoriness and semantic selectivity (Koenig et al.,
2002a, 2003).1 The first criterion, semantic obligatori-
ness, stipulates that if a participant role is required bythe class of situations described by a verb or verb sense,
then the information relevant to this participant is ac-
tivated upon recognition of this verb. In other words,
for a participant role to be encoded as an argument in
the lexical entry for a particular verb or verb sense, it
must be true of all situations that are described by that
verb sense. The semantic obligatoriness criterion can be
illustrated by comparing the example sentences in (4a)and (4b) to the one in (4c).
(4) a. The incompetent employee was reprimanded in
the office.
b. The incompetent employee was dismissed from
the office.
c. The incompetent employee gave the document to
his boss for John.
Consider first the status of the optional constituentsin the office and from the office in sentences (4a) and (4b).
In the office in (4a) expresses an Event Location (place in
which all participants in the event described by the verb
are located) and from the office in (4b) expresses a
Source Location (the point of origin for the event de-
scribed by the verb). Event Locations pass the obliga-
toriness criterion because there are no situations
described by the sense of reprimand expressed in (4a)that do not require an Event Location participant role.
Thus, Event Locations are candidates for lexical en-
coding, and by extension, for argument status. Similarly
in the sentence in (4b), the Source Location from the
office, is a candidate for lexical encoding because there
are no situations described by the sense of the verb
dismiss in (4b) that do not require a Source Location.
This can be contrasted to the optional constituent for
John, shown in example (4c). This constituent expresses
a Beneficiary Participant (the entity for whom the giving
was done). Beneficiaries do not pass the obligatoriness
criterion because giving events do not require that the
1 See Dowty (1982) for an early proposal of the role of semantic
obligatoriness in determining argumenthood.
event be done for someone. Because, they do not passthe semantic obligatoriness criterion, beneficiaries are
not candidates for lexical encoding.
Thus far, based on the semantic obligatoriness crite-
rion, both Event Locations and Source Locations are
candidates for lexical encoding. Proposing that Event
Locations are candidates for lexical encoding contra-
dicts most linguists� intuitions. It has been observed in-
formally that Event Locations can co-occur with mostevent-denoting verbs, an intuition that we corroborated
quantitatively, as we discuss below. Our theory of lexical
encoding also requires that the participant information
be specific to a restricted class of verbs. We call this
second condition of lexical encoding the semantic spec-
ificity criterion.
According to the semantic specificity criterion, for a
participant role to be lexically encoded as an argument ofa verb, it must be specific to that verb or to a restricted
class of verbs. The set of argument candidates in exam-
ples (4a) and (4b) changes when the specificity criterion is
applied. While Event Locations are obligatory for all
situations described by the sense of the verb reprimand in
(4a), an Event Location participant is not specific to
events of reprimanding, or to any semantically coherent
group of verbs. Instead Event Locations are obligatoryfor the events described by many verbs, as is illustrated
by the sentences in example (5). In the sentences in (5),
the verb is underlined to demonstrate that Event Loca-
tions are true of a wide variety of verb classes.
(5) a. The notorious felon was beaten in the jail.
b. The seeing-eye dog was slapped in the mall.
c. The ring was scrutinized in the store.
d. The flower was admired in the garden.
e. The unruly child was scolded in the classroom.
f. The gift was presented at the party.
In fact, we have quantified the observation that Event
Location participants are true of the eventualities de-
scribed by almost all verbs. Koenig et al. (2002b, 2003)
had a pair of raters assess all of the verbs in the MRC
psycholinguistics database (Coltheart, 1981), for whe-
ther each described a situation in which an Event Lo-cation was required. Of the approximately 5500 verbs in
the MRC database, 4142 verbs were known to both
raters. And of these, 98.2% required an Event Location.
This confirms our claim that Event Locations are not
specific to a restricted class of verbs. However, if we turn
to Source Location participants, we find that this is not
the case. For the work described in this paper, we had a
different pair of raters assess whether the verbs in theMRC database had a Source Location participant. Each
rater independently determined which verbs required a
Source Location.2 Of the 3615 verbs known to both
2 This leaves open the important question of how small a verb class
has to be in order to be specific. For an extended discussion of this
issue see Koenig et al. (2003).
Table 1
Sample stimuli and their presentation regions
Subject NP Verb D.O. (+with) Final
NP-filler sentences
NP-filler
a. Which sword did the rebels behead the traitor king with [gap] during the rebellion?
b. Which sword did the rebels kill the traitor king with [gap] during the rebellion?
PP-filler sentences
PP-filler
c. With which sword did the rebels behead the traitor king [gap] during the rebellion?
d. With which sword did the rebels kill the traitor king [gap] during the rebellion?
224 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
raters, only 11.6% of them required a Source Location.
Thus, unlike Event Locations, which are true of almost
all verbs, Source Locations are only true of a small class
of verbs and therefore meet the specificity criterion.3
Because, Source Locations pass both the semantic
obligatoriness and specificity criteria, while Event Lo-
cations only pass the semantic obligatoriness criterion, a
Source Location is predicted to be lexically encoded asan argument of a verb like dismiss despite being syn-
tactically optional. In contrast, an Event Location,
which is also syntactically optional, is not predicted to
be lexically encoded as a participant role of the verb
reprimand, but rather, is predicted to be an adjunct. One
way to think about the specificity criterion is this: If a
verb�s meaning is specified, in part, by its participants
and their modes of participation in the described situa-tion, then the presence or absence of an Event Location
does not help in individuating the meaning of one verb
from another. However, Source Locations serve to dis-
tinguish the meanings of a restricted class of verbs that
bear a Source entailment from classes of verbs that do
not. Semantic specificity, therefore, affects the encoding
of participant information in the mental lexicon.
If the obligatoriness and semantic specificity criteriatruly serve to identify arguments, we should be able to
find psycholinguistic evidence for this. A recent study by
Koenig et al. (2003) showed that WH-fillers are more
easily integrated into gaps when the participant role as-
sociated with a filler is semantically obligatory but syn-
tactically optional than when a filler is both syntactically
and semantically optional. They compared sentences
containing verbs like behead, which require an Instru-ment participant, to sentences containing verbs like kill,
which allow an Instrument participant, but do not re-
quire one. These sentences are illustrated in Table 1.
Koenig et al. compared the processing of NP WH-
fillers like (a) and (b) in Table 1 to PP WH-fillers like
3 As in Koenig et al. (2002a, 2003), the percentage given here
should be considered an estimate, since all senses of a lemma were
counted as one entry. This means that when a verb had several entries,
only one of which entailed a Source Participant, the verb was marked
as requiring this participant role.
those in (c) and (d). The sentences in (a) and (c) con-
tained a ‘‘behead’’ verb, whose lexical representation
include an obligatory Instrument participant. The sen-
tences in (b) and (d) contained a ‘‘kill’’ verb, whose
lexical representation does not include an obligatory
Instrument participant. The logic of this filler-gap ex-
periment, which is similar to that used in the current
study, depended on the presence of a WH-filler whichwas semantically appropriate to fill the role associated
with the indirect object position, but which was se-
mantically inappropriate to fill the role associated with
the direct object position. For example, in these sen-
tences swords cannot be beheaded or killed. Because
there is a WH-filler, readers will attempt to integrate it,
typically by trying to posit a gap in the direct object
position (Boland et al., 1990, 1995; Clifton & Frazier,1989; Crain & Fodor, 1985; Stowe, 1986; Tanenhaus,
Boland, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1989). Thus, Koenig et al.
predicted and found that readers encounter processing
difficulty as they attempt to integrate the filler (i.e.,
sword) into the direct object position because it is im-
plausible as a Patient of either kill or behead. This
processing difficulty was averted when the verb provided
some semantic evidence that the filler could plausibly beassociated with an indirect object gap. Therefore, fillers
were easier to integrate when filler-gap sentences con-
tained a ‘‘behead’’ verb rather than a ‘‘kill’’ verb. The
fact that sentences whose instrument fillers were re-
quired by the main verb were integrated faster than
fillers whose main verb did not require an instrument
provides evidence for the role of semantic obligatoriness
in determining the lexical encoding of participant in-formation. While these results illustrate the role of se-
mantic obligatoriness in identifying which participants
are lexically encoded in the representation of verbs, they
do not address whether semantic specificity also plays a
role.
2. Experiment
In this study we examine the role of semantic speci-
ficity in distinguishing participant information that is
K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230 225
lexically encoded from participant information that isnot, when both semantic obligatoriness and syntactic
obligatoriness are held constant. We examined the
processing of filler-gap sentences whose verbs differed in
whether the participant roles associated with their op-
tionally expressed Location Participants were specific to
a restricted class of verbs or not. In particular, we
compared the processing of passive filler-gap sentences
like those in Table 2, whose main verb either fell into arestricted class of verbs requiring a Source Location
(e.g., sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs like (b) and (d)) or
fell into the unrestricted class of verbs that require an
Event Location (e.g., sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs
like (a) and (c)).
The sentences in Table 2 are shown segmented into
five presentation regions, the third and fourth of which
were our regions of analysis. The first region includedeither an NP or PP WH-filler. The second and third
regions contained an auxiliary verb plus subject phrase,
and the main verb, respectively. The fourth region,
which was the critical region of analysis, included the
gap to which the WH-filler must be attached, and an
agent by-phrase. For sentences with NP-fillers, this
region also included the preposition in or from. Hence-
forth this region will be referred to as the agentby-phrase region. The final region contained an adver-
bial or prepositional phrase. This region was included
so that end-of-sentence wrap-up effects would not
contaminate reading times in the critical region.
By hypothesis, the lexical semantic representations of
verbs like dismiss in (b) and (d) in Table 2 encode a
Source Location because this participant information is
required of all situations described by this class of verbsand because Source Locations are restricted to a rela-
tively small class of verbs. In contrast, the lexical se-
mantic representations of verbs like reprimand in (a) and
(c) do not encode an Event Location, despite the fact
that Event Locations are semantically obligatory for
these verbs, because Event Locations are not specific to
a restricted class of verbs.
We predicted that NP-filler sentences whose verbsencode a source participant, like (b), should be pro-
cessed more easily than sentences like (a) whose verbs do
not. This is because verbs like dismiss should provide the
Table 2
Sample stimuli and their presentation regions
NP-filler Subject Ver
NP-filler sentences
a. Which office was the incompetent employee repr
b. Which office was the incompetent employee dism
PP-filler Subject Ver
PP-filler sentences
c. In which office was the incompetent employee repr
d. From which office was the incompetent employee dism
reader with lexical-semantic information about a sourcerole for the filler. In contrast, verbs of the ‘‘reprimand’’
class provide no such helpful semantic role information.
Although our experimental sentences were not anoma-
lous, we nonetheless expected processing difficulty to
emerge at the Agent by-phrase region for ‘‘reprimand’’
verb sentences with NP-fillers given that other filler-gap
studies using verbs that subcategorize for more than a
direct object but which have used a plausibility manip-ulation, have found anomaly effects in the word position
immediately following the verb (cf. discussion in
Tanenhaus, Boland, Mauner, & Carlson, 1993). Finally,
following Koenig et al. (2003), we also expected sen-
tences with PP-fillers to be easier to process than sen-
tences with NP-fillers. Sentences like those in (c) and (d)
with fronted PPs that provide readers with a clear syn-
tactic cue for filler integration should be processed moreeasily than sentences like those in (a) and (b), where
there is no syntactic cue aiding filler integration.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants
Eighty native English speaking undergraduates from
the University at Buffalo received partial course creditfor their participation in this study.
2.1.2. Materials and norming
Twenty passive filler-gap sentence quadruples, such
as those in Table 2, were constructed. The sentences
differed only in whether their main verb was a Source
Location verb like dismiss (b) and (d) or an Event Lo-
cation verb like reprimand (a) and (c) and whether thepreposition heading the gap was from or in.
The stimuli presented in Table 2 were extensively
normed. Because information about the semantic fit or
plausibility of particular nouns with respect to real-
world knowledge is used rapidly during on-line sentence
processing (e.g., McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997;
Stowe, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1991; Tanenhaus et al.,
1989; Tanenhaus, Stowe, & Carlson, 1985; Trueswell,Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994), our first norming study
was done to ensure that, within each ‘‘reprimand’’ and
‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence pair, the NPs in the WH-fillers
b (PP) [gap] by-phrase Final
imanded in [gap] by the manager yesterday?
issed from [gap] by the manager yesterday?
b Agent by-phrase Final
imanded [gap] by the manager yesterday?
issed [gap] by the manager yesterday?
226 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
(e.g., which office) were equally plausible as event orsource locations, respectively. This norming was done in
two stages. First, separate groups of participants were
asked to provide either (1) highly plausible or (2) pos-
sible but highly implausible fillers for the missing NP of
filler-gap sentences, as shown in example (6). Crucially
the sentences differed in whether they contained a
‘‘reprimand’’ or ‘‘dismiss’’ verb. The pairs presented in
(6) were counterbalanced across two presentation listssuch that each participant saw only one pair member in
each condition and each list contained an equal number
of sentences from each condition.
(6) a. In which _____ was the incompetent employee
reprimanded by the manager yesterday?
b. From which _____ was the incompetent employee
dismissed by the manager yesterday?
When participants were asked to provide highlyplausible fillers for the sentences in (6) they responded
with items like, store, office, and company. When asked
to provide possible but highly implausible fillers, they
listed items like soup kitchen, and taxi. The participant-
generated fillers that were listed most frequently were
shown to a separate group of participants who rated, on
a 7-point Likert scale, how likely this list of plausible
and implausible NPs were as the fillers of either a‘‘dismiss’’ or ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentence frame. The
same counterbalancing constraints that were used in the
first stage of norming were used in this second stage.
The obtained ratings were used to select an NP to
serve as a filler for each sentence quadruple. For each
‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence pair, we se-
lected an NP that had a mean rating that was above the
mean for all of the candidates that had been generatedfor that pair and that was also above the midpoint of the
Likert scale. Differences in the ratings for selected NPs of
‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentence frames never
exceeded .55, and when there was a difference, we always
selected an NP that was rated more plausible as an Event
rather than Source Location. The mean plausibility rat-
ings for NP-fillers of ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs was 6.3
(SE ¼ :09), and 6.0 (SE ¼ :1) for ‘‘dismiss’’ verb fillers.In a second study, we normed the resultant NP- and
PP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’
verbs for grammaticality. This was done to rule out the
possibility that any observed differences between ‘‘dis-
miss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences could be due to
island violations, given that many types of extractions
that have been identified as examples of island violation
phenomena elicit judgments of ungrammaticality. Thesentence quadruples presented in (7) were counterbal-
anced across four presentation lists such that each par-
ticipant saw each member of a quadruple in only one
condition and an equal number of sentences in each
condition were included in each list. These sentences
were pseudo-randomly intermixed with 72 control sen-
tences such that no two experimental items appeared
successively. The control sentences represented a varietyof grammatical violations, ranging from mild subject–
verb agreement violations like Patrick write a lot of
poems about nature to palpable island violations like
What did Rob make the claim that he saw on the billboard
as well as 25 grammatical sentences. Participants rated,
on a 7-point Likert scale, how natural each sentence was
as a sentence of English to say, read, or hear. A rating of
1 indicated that the sentence was very unnatural, while arating of 7 indicated that a sentence was fully natural.
(7) a. Which office was the incompetent employee repri-
manded in by the manager yesterday?
b. Which office was the incompetent employee
dismissed from by the manager yesterday?
c. In which office was the incompetent employee
reprimanded by the manager yesterday?
d. From which office was the incompetent employeedismissed by the manager yesterday?
NP-filler sentences with Source and Event location
verbs had mean ratings of 5.3 (SE ¼ :4) and 5.3
(SE ¼ 1:1), respectively. PP-filler sentences with Source
and Event location verbs had mean ratings of 5.1
(SE ¼ :4) and 4.5 (SE ¼ :6), respectively. The mean
rating for sentences with grammatical violations was
3.21 (SE ¼ :17). ‘‘Reprimand’’ verb sentences with PP-fillers were rated as less acceptable than ‘‘reprimand’’
verb sentences with NP-fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 2:74, p < :01, andless acceptable than ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences with PP-
fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 3:58, p < :002, or NP-fillers, tð19Þ ¼ 4:61,p < :0002. While we do not know why these sentences
were found less acceptable, this finding is not a problem
for our hypotheses for two reasons. First, extraction of a
PP adjunct does not constitute an island violation.Second, the ratings for ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences were
still well above the midpoint of the Likert scale and were
still rated as significantly more acceptable than the
control sentences with grammatical violations,
tð65Þ ¼ 4:6, p < :0001.In sum, the results of our norming studies show that
our experimental stimuli were all rated as acceptable,
natural sentences of English and that the NPs in theWH-fillers were equally plausible in all conditions. Thus,
any differences we might observe in on-line processing
are unlikely to be due to either differences in plausibility
or grammaticality.
From the list of sentences normed to be grammati-
cally acceptable with plausible fillers, we selected 20
sentence quadruples like those illustrated in Table 2. The
members of each quadruple were counterbalancedacross four presentation lists such that only one member
of each quadruple appeared on a list and each list con-
tained an equal number of sentences in each condition.
Experimental sentences were pseudo-randomly inter-
mixed with 75 distractor sentences so that no two ex-
perimental items appeared successively. Distractors and
practice sentences contained a number of different
K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230 227
question forms, including Yes–No questions, and WHquestions with NP or PP-fillers extracted from a variety
of syntactic positions. Overall half of the practice items
and distractors contained fronted NPs or PPs (e.g., With
which hammer did Robert take out the rusty nail from the
wall?). Distractor sentences were included to disguise the
nature of the experimental manipulation. Finally, be-
cause participants were asked to judge whether each
sentence they read made sense, 25% of the practice anddistractor sentences were designed not to make sense
(e.g., At what time did the professor pop the balloon that
held the sun in the air?).
2.2. Procedure
Sentences were presented using a participant-paced,
moving window procedure. Each trial began by dis-playing two rows of dashes and blank spaces across a
monitor�s screen. The dashes corresponded to all of the
non-white-space characters of the stimulus sentence. The
WH-filler, subject, verb, and agent by-phrase regions
were all displayed entirely on the first line while the final
region was presented on the second line. To reveal the
first region, participants pressed a ‘‘Yes’’ key, causing the
dashes corresponding to this region be replaced by text.Participants kept pressing the ‘‘Yes’’ key as long as the
sentence they were reading made sense. Each subsequent
press of the ‘‘Yes’’ key caused the just read region to
revert to dashes, while simultaneously revealing text of
the next region. If at any time, a sentence stopped
making sense, participants pressed the ‘‘No’’ key. A
‘‘No’’ response immediately terminated the trial. Read-
ing times and make-sense judgments were collected foreach region. Before beginning the experiment, partici-
pants read some instructions that described the task.
Following the instructions, participants completed 20
practice trials to familiarize themselves with the task and
the response keys before beginning the experiment.
2.3. Results and discussion
With an incremental judgment task, there are typi-
cally two dependant variables, the ‘‘No’’ judgments and
the reading times for sentences that participants con-
Table 3
Mean cumulative percentages of ‘‘No’’ judgments for Source Location (‘‘dism
PP-fillers across five sentence regions
WH-filler Aux verb+ subject
NP-filler 0 0
Source location
NP-filler 0 0
Event location
PP-filler 0 0
Source location
PP-filler 0 .6
Event location
tinue to say ‘‘Yes’’ to. Typically, judgments are used todetect syntactic or semantic anomalies embedded in
sentences. However in this study, there were no em-
bedded anomalies. Our experimental sentences were
normed for grammatical acceptability and for equiva-
lent plausibility of the fillers across conditions. Conse-
quently, we used the judgments as an on-line referendum
of the acceptability of our experimental sentences. We
predicted that there would be few ‘‘No’’ judgments inany condition, and no differences in ‘‘No’’ judgments at
any region across conditions. Because we expected few
‘‘No’’ judgments, the main dependent variable in this
study was the reading times that were elicited at each
region by ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences
with NP- and PP-fillers. These reading times served as
an index of processing effort. Our main prediction was
that ‘‘reprimand’’ sentences with NP-fillers would bemore difficult to process than both the controls with PP-
fillers and ‘‘dismiss’’ verb sentences with an NP-filler,
and hence would elicit longer reading times at the agent
by-phrase region.
2.3.1. Judgments
Percentages of ‘‘No’’ responses were tabulated for
each region. Mean cumulative percentages of ‘‘No’’ re-sponses at each region for ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’
verb sentences with NP- and PP-fillers are shown in
Table 3. Both NP- and PP-filler ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘repri-
mand’’ sentences were judged highly felicitous, eliciting
no more than 7% in the cumulative ‘‘No’’ judgments at
the Agent by-phrase region and no more than 14% in the
cumulative ‘‘No’’ judgments at the final region. These
percentages ‘‘No’’ judgments are comparable to sen-tences judged felicitous in other studies using judgments
as a primary source of data for anomaly detection (e.g.,
Mauner & Koenig, 2000). Because of the low number of
‘‘No’’ responses no statistical analysis is possible.
However, these results indicate that we were successful
in equating experimental sentences for grammaticality
and plausibility.
2.3.2. Reading times
For sentences that readers continued to judge felici-
tous, we computed residual reading times for the verb
iss’’) and Event Location (‘‘reprimand’’) verb sentences with NP- and
Verb Agent by-phrase Final
3 6.9 13.6
1.8 6.9 12.6
.3 3.8 13.9
.8 3.3 10.4
Fig. 1. Residual reading times for verb and agent by-phrase regions.
4 The Brown and Wall Street Journal are text databases in the Penn
Treebank parsed corpus. Although these corpora are relatively small,
consisting of approximately two million words, we used these
databases because they are both convenient and widely available.
228 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
and agent by-phrase regions. Residual reading times areshown in Fig. 1. We analyzed residual reading times
rather than raw reading times for each participant be-
cause they partial out the influence of string length
which differed across conditions at the critical agent by-
phrase region (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Trueswell et al.,
1994). These differences were due to the presence of
different prepositions, from and in, across ‘‘dismiss’’ and
‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences with NP-fillers and to theabsence of a preposition in sentences with PP-fillers.
Mean residual reading times at the verb and agent by-
phrase regions of ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb
sentences with NP and PP WH-fillers are presented in
Fig. 1.
Participant and item means were submitted to two
separate 4 (presentation list)� 2(verb class)� 5 (region)
analyses of variances. Although, analyses were con-ducted at all five regions, for the purposes of this paper
we will only present the results for the verb and agent
by-phrase regions, where effects would be most likely to
be observed. All the results discussed here were signifi-
cant at least at p < :05 for both participant and items.
The verb region was processed faster in sentences
with PP-fillers than NP-fillers, but this effect was sig-
nificant only in the analysis by participants. As pre-dicted, at the agent by-phrase region, whether or not a
verb lexically specified a Source Participant significantly
interacted with whether the sentence had an NP or PP
WH-filler. Crucially, NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’
Source Location verbs, like example (b) in Table 2,
elicited significantly faster reading times than NP-filler
sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs, like example (a) in
Table 2. In addition, the processing of PP-filler sen-tences, which provided both semantic and syntactic cues
for filler integration, was significantly faster than the
processing of sentences with NP-fillers, but there was no
difference in reading times between ‘‘dismiss’’ and‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences with PP-fillers. The facili-
tation for sentences with PP-fillers is most likely due to
the fronted preposition providing both syntactic and
semantic cues that the filler is impossible as a direct
object, and therefore must be integrated into the sen-
tences after the direct object position.
These results suggest that when a participant role was
specific to a restricted class of verbs, processing of filler-gap sentences was facilitated. This strongly supports the
hypothesis that specificity plays an important role in
distinguishing participants that are lexically encoded in
the representation of verbs from those that are not.
However, there is an alternative hypothesis that must be
considered, namely that the faster reading times for NP-
filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs relative to sentences
with ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs is due to the relative frequencywith which ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs co-occur with from+NP
source phrases and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs occur with
PP+ location phrases.
To test this hypothesis, we examined whether agent
by-phrase reading times for NP-filler sentences with
‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs were predicted by the
frequency with which these verbs co-occurred in a cor-
pus with a PP expressing a Source Location, or a PPexpressing any type of Location, respectively. Note that
this latter analysis is biased towards finding a relation-
ship in that location PPs were not restricted to the
preposition in. We computed the proportion of PPs
headed by from expressing a Source Location that co-
occurred with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs and the proportion of
PPs expressing any kind of location (i.e., Source, Path,
Goal, Participant Location, and Event Location) thatco-occurred with our ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs in the com-
bined Brown and Wall Street Journal corpora.4 We then
regressed the residual reading times at the agent by-
phrase for ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentences
with NP-fillers against the percentages of Source or
Location PPs, respectively, that co-occurred with each
‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verb. Reading times for
four ‘‘dismiss’’ and three ‘‘reprimand’’ verb sentenceswere omitted because their verbs occurred less than four
times in the combined corpora. If the reading times we
obtained are due to differences in the frequency with
which Location PPs co-occur with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘rep-
rimand’’ verbs, then we would expect that frequency
would be negatively correlated with reading times for
both verb classes.
We present scatterplots for these two regressionanalyses in Figs. 2A and B. As Fig. 2A shows, reading
times for NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs that
Fig. 2. (A) Percentages of Source verbs followed by a from+NP source phrase in corpora vs. residual reading time. (B) Percentages of Event
Location verbs followed by a PP+Location phrase in corpora vs. residual reading time.
K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230 229
specify a Source Location are not predicted by the fre-quency with which these verbs co-occur with a PP ex-
pressing a source, r ¼ :133, p > :63. Fig. 2B shows that
reading times for NP-filler sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’
verbs are marginally predicted by the frequency with
which they co-occur with a PP expressing a location,
r ¼ :463, p < :06, but this positive correlation is in the
opposite direction that would be predicted by any ac-
count under which co-occurrence frequencies facilitatereading times, and is also driven entirely by one data
point, corresponding to the verb slap. When this verb is
omitted, the correlation is not significant, r ¼ :003,p < :99.5 While the results of these regression analyses
are consistent with the hypothesis that the frequency
with which a location expressing PP co-occurs with a
5 One reviewer suggested that a more appropriate test of whether
reading times were predicted by Location PP co-occurrence frequen-
cies would be to evaluate whether the correlations between the
percentage of Source and Location PPs co-occurring with ‘‘dismiss’’
and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs, respectively, differed from each other.
Unfortunately, this computation requires a shared variable, and
therefore cannot be computed (Cohen & Cohen, 1983). However, it
was possible to regress residual reading times at the agent by-phrase
region of NP-filler sentences with ‘‘dismiss’’ and ‘‘reprimand’’ verbs
against the frequency with which these verbs co-occurred with any
kind of Location PP, and compare the resulting correlation. The
correlation for the Source verbs was not significant, r ¼ :084, p > :75,
and neither was the difference between the correlations, t ¼ 1:41,
p ¼ :17. Because we thought it possible that the frequencies with which
verbs co-occur with Location PPs might be more likely to be correlated
with reading times when readers had information about a Location PP
before encountering the verb, we also regressed reading times for PP-
filler sentences with ‘‘reprimand’’ and ‘‘dismiss’’ verbs against the
percentage of times these verbs occurred with a Location PP in the
combined Brown and Wall Street Journal Corpora. Neither correla-
tion was significant, psP :23.
verb does not predict filler integration times, these re-sults should be viewed cautiously given that they are
based on frequency statistics culled from a relatively
small sample of text.
3. General discussion
These results support the conclusion that the se-mantic specificity criterion distinguishes the participants
that are lexically encoded as arguments of verbs from
those that are not. Filler-gap sentences were processed
more easily when the lexical semantic representation of
the verb included a Source Location than when it did
not. More specifically, faster reading times were elicited
at the agent by-phrase region immediately following
dismiss verbs, which provided lexical evidence for inte-gration of the NP-filler. These results support the view
that readers use Source Location information that is
associated with dismiss verbs but not reprimand verbs to
project gaps for WH-fillers. In other words, readers
found it easier to integrate fillers into sentences when
they contained a verb that is a member of a restricted
class (characterized by sharing the participant type as-
sociated with the filler) than when it was not. Thishappened in spite of the fact that the participant type
associated with both fillers was semantically obligatory.
The extensive norming makes it unlikely that these re-
sults could be driven the plausibility or grammaticality
of our WH-fillers.
Because all location fillers were rated to be more
plausible for the sentences containing a reprimand verb,
it is unlikely that the results can be attributed to thegeneral conceptual knowledge of readers and the relative
230 K. Conklin et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 221–230
likelihood of particular fillers of participant roles.Rather, the results are likely to stem from the more
‘‘distilled’’ knowledge that strongly associates situation-
types activated upon recognition of verbs and some
participant roles (e.g., the Source Location role in the
case of dismiss verbs), but not others (e.g., the Event
Location role in the case of reprimand verbs). The results
of our grammaticality norming make it unlikely that our
findings are due entirely to differences in the naturalnessof our sentences. Crucially, our corpora study makes it
unlikely that our results are driven by the frequency with
which from+NP source phrases occur with dismiss
verbs, but this result will have to be replicated with a
larger corpus.
These results provide additional evidence that se-
mantic participant information is activated upon the
recognition of a verb. Importantly, as was demonstratedby the results of our corpora study, the semantic par-
ticipant information that is associated with a verb is not
merely an association of the frequency of occurrence of
certain phrases like from+NP source phrases with verbs
like dismiss.
These results contribute to our understanding of how
participant information is encoded in the verbal mental
lexicon. They suggest that semantic specificity affects theencoding of participant information in the mental lexi-
con. However, our findings raise the important question
of how specific participant role information has to be in
order to be encoded in the lexical representation of
verbs. Because Event Locations are required by 98.2%
of verbs they are not hypothesized to be lexically en-
coded. Source Participants, on the other hand, are re-
quired by only 11.6% of verbs and are thereforehypothesized to be lexically encoded. Determining how
specific a participant role must be in order to be encoded
in the mental representation of a verb is a question we
are currently pursuing.
References
Boland, J., Tanenhaus, M., & Garnsey, S. (1990). Evidence for the
immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing.
Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 413–432.
Boland, J., Tanenhaus, M., Garnsey, S., & Carlson, G. (1995). Verb
argument structure in parsing and interpretation: Evidence from
wh-questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 774–806.
Bresnan, J. (1982). Control and complementation. In J. Bresnan (Ed.),
The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 292–390).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, J., & Cohen, P. (1983). Applied multiple regression/correlation
analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 56–57). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht:
Foris.
Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1989). Comprehending sentences with long-
distance dependencies. In G. Carlson & M. Tanenhaus (Eds.),
Linguistic structure in language processing. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33, 497–505.
Crain, S., & Fodor, J. (1985). How can grammars help parsers. In D.
Dowty, L. Kartunnen, & A. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural language
parsing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dowty, D. (1982). Grammatical relations and Montague grammar. In
P. Jacobson & G. Pullum (Eds.), The nature of syntactic represen-
tations (pp. 79–130). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Ferreira, F., & Clifton, C. (1986). The independence of syntactic
processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348–368.
Foley, W., & Van Valin, R. (1984). Functional syntax and universal
grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Koenig, J.-P., Mauner, G., & Bienvenue, B. (2002a). Class specificity
and the lexical encoding of participant information. Brain and
Language, 81, 224–235.
Koenig, J.-P., Mauner, G., & Bienvenue, B. (2002b). Factors of
argumenthood: A quantitative and experimental perspective. Uni-
versity at Buffalo Working Papers on Language and Perception, 1.
Available on-line from: http://perkins.socsci.buffalo.edu/lswp/.
Koenig, J.-P., Mauner, G., & Bienvenue, B. (2003). Arguments for
adjuncts. Cognition, 89, 67–103.
Mauner, G., & Koenig, J.-P. (2000). Linguistic vs. conceptual sources
of implicit agents in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory
and Language, 43, 110–134.
Mauner, G., Tanenhaus, M., & Carlson, G. (1995). Implicit arguments
in sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 357–
382.
McRae, K., Ferretti, T., & Amyote, L. (1997). Thematic roles as verb-
specific concepts. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 137–176.
Miller, P. (1997). Compl�ements et circonstants: une distinction
syntaxique ou s�emantique? In 37e congr�es de la SAES. Nice,
France.
Pollard, C., & Sag, I. (1987). Information-based syntax and semantics
(Vol. 1). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Sch€utze, C. (1995). PP attachment and argumenthood. Papers on
language processing and acquisition (Vol. 26, pp. 95–151). Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT.
Sch€utze, C., & Gibson, E. (1999). Argumenthood and English
prepositional phrase attachment. Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage, 40, 409–431.
Speer, S., & Clifton, C. (1998). Plausibility and argument structure in
sentence comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 26, 965–978.
Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Sedivy, J. (1995). Resolving attachment
ambiguities with multiple constraints. Cognition, 55, 227–267.
Stowe, L. (1986). Parsing wh-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap
location. Language and Cognitive processes, 2, 227–246.
Stowe, L., Tanenhaus, M., & Carlson, G. (1991). Filling gaps on-line:
Use of lexical and semantic information in sentence processing.
Language and Speech, 34, 319–340.
Tanenhaus, M., Boland, J., Garnsey, S., & Carlson, G. (1989). Lexical
structure in parsing long-distance dependencies. Journal of Psycho-
linguistic Research: Special Issue on Sentence Processing, 18, 37–50.
Tanenhaus, M., Boland, J., Mauner, G., & Carlson, G. (1993). More
on combinatory lexical information. In G. Altmann & R. Shillcock
(Eds.), Cognitive models of speech processing: The second sperlonga
meeting (pp. 297–319). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tanenhaus, M., Stowe, L., & Carlson, G., 1985. The interaction of
lexical expectation and pragmatics in parsing filler-gap construc-
tions. In Proceedings of the seventh annual cognitive science society
meeting.
Trueswell, J., Tanenhaus, M., & Garnsey, S. (1994). Semantic
influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic
ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 285–
318.
Vater, H., 1978. On the possibility of distinguishing between comple-
ments and adjuncts. Valence, semantic case, and grammatical
relations (pp. 21–45). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
top related