PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION

Unit 6: Syntactic sentence processing

M. Sc. Tania León

DOCENTE
 Contents
1. Complexity and sentence processing
2. The clausal hypothesis
3. Explicit syntactic markers
4. Strategies for syntactic processing
5. Garden paths and the sausage
machine
6. Syntactic category ambiguity
7. Cross-linguistic evidence for
M. Sc. Tania León
processing strategies
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 How Do We Interpret Sentences Parsing Strategies

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 1. Complexity and sentence processing
‘Parsing’ refers to the syntactic structural analysis of the
input string of words.
In sentence-picture matching tasks, participants are
given a sentence and have to select from a set of pictures
which picture best illustrates the meaning of the sentence.
Grammatical structure is not the only factor that influences
comprehension.
In a memory task it was demonstrated that sentences
were more confusable with one another the more closely
related they were in terms of transformations.
When we understand a sentence, we do not hold it in its
original form in our memory. Instead, we process it and
move on.

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 2. The clausal hypothesis

It is related to the derivational theory of complexity. It claims that the clause is the basic unit of analysis in language comprehension.
The clause is a group of words in a sentence that includes a verb. There are finite clauses, where a verb can carry markings for tense
and for number agreement. They can include main verb clauses:
John walked.
They ride on donkeys.
There are non-finite clauses with verbs that can not be marked in this way:
John wanted to leave work early.
Finite clauses can also include subordinate clauses:
The man who John saw was very tall.

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 2. The clausal hypothesis

It is a special instance, for language, of a ‘chunking’ process. The usefulness of chunking is demonstrated in experiments in which
subjects are better able to remember number sequences if they are encouraged to chunk them.
It was hypothesized that language chunking might proceed on the basis of sentence structure, and sentences are chunked into units
like clauses.
Processing within clauses
Language is segmented into clauses at some stage during comprehension, but processing can carry on during a clause.
Normal prose is both syntactically and semantically well-formed.
Anomalous prose is syntactically well-formed but has little meaning.
Scrambled prose is neither syntactically nor semantically well-formed, but consists of real words.
Jabberwocky is syntactically well-formed, but has nonwords in the place of most or all of the content words.

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 2. The clausal hypothesis

When the sentence has structure, a word within that

sentence can be responded to more rapidly; this response
facilitation increases as more of the sentence is heard;
and the availability of both syntactic and semantic
(meaning) structure results in a faster decrease in
response times than the availability of syntactic structure
alone.
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 3. Explicit syntactic markers
The following sentence remains grammatical, even though a complementiser (that) and a relative pronoun (who)
have been left out :
I told Mark the woman I met had red hair.
compared to:
I told Mark that the woman who I met had red hair.
Leaving out syntactic markers can affect processing. For instance, response times in a phoneme monitoring task
were faster when explicit markers of syntactic structure were present. Listeners find it easier to complete the
syntactic analysis when syntactic structure is more explicitly marked and are therefore better able to pay attention to
the phonemes in the input.
The more complex a sentence structure is, the more helpful explicit markers of syntax tend to be. Since explicit
markers are words and grammatical endings that occur very frequently in the language (inflectional endings,
determiners, conjunctions, etc.),

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 Exercise

How would punctuation or other explicit marking of syntax help clarify the sentences?
1a. Though George kept on reading the story still bothered him.
1b. Though George kept on reading the story Sue bothered him.
2a. The teacher told the children the ghost story that she knew would frighten tem.
2b. The teacher told the children the ghost story had frightened that it wasn’t true.
3a. Without her contributions the funds are inadequate.
3b. Without her contributions would be very inadequate.
4a. Sally was relieved when she found out the answer to the physics problem.
4b. Sally found out the answer to the physics problem was in the book.

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 3. Explicit syntactic markers
Prosody and punctuation
Prosodic phrase-structure cues perform much the same function as syntactic markers, they make the syntactic
structure of an utterance more explicit.
Punctuation provides a similar marking of syntactic structure. The following sentences would be identical if it were not
for punctuation.
What is this thing called love?
What is this thing called, love?
What, is this thing called love?

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 4. Strategies for syntactic processing

Discontinuous constituents are difficult to process. The more material that intervenes between rang and up, the more difficult it is to
process the sentence.
Lou rang her friend up.
Lou rang her friend in the Outer Hebrides up.
Low rang her friend in the Outer H. that she hadn’t seen since their trip together to Japan the summer before last up.
The problem with the last sentence is that when we encounter the word up it is disconnected from what we have read or heard just
prior to that point.
Although the following sentence is unambiguous, it is problematic. Most readers do a double-take, and have to go back and read the
sentence again to get the right analysis.
Sandy said that Terry will take the cleaning out yesterday.

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 5. Garden paths and the sausage machine

A garden path sentence is one which leads the reader/listener ‘up the garden path’ by initially inducing an interpretation
which turns out to be incorrect. It involves a misleading syntactic analysis.
Many people struggles for some time to work out what it means, or even that it is a well-formed sentence in English.
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Most readers prefer to interpret raced past the barn as what the horse did. A successful revision will result in raced past the barn being
interpreted as a relative clause. The same ambiguity would not arise for a verb like drive,
Reduced relatives are relative clauses without who, which or that, and with no auxiliary.
Other interpretations of the example involve different understanding of the meanings of one or more words, or require some
additional punctuation, a semicolon after past. (The horse raced past; the barn fell).
Sausage machine derives from the way the human sentence processor packages the input words into strings of phrases
much as a machine manufacturing sausages packages

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 5. Garden paths and the sausage machine

Late Closure and Minimal Attachment

They are two parsing strategies proposed to help the parser meet these criteria.
LATE CLOSURE: When possible, attach material into the clause or phrase currently being processed.
MINIMAL ATTACHMENT: Attached incoming material into the phrase marker being constructed, using the fewest possible nodes
consistent with the well-formedness rules of the language under consideration.
Consider the possible analyses of the sequence
Before the police stopped the driver he was getting nervous.

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 5. Garden paths and the sausage machine
Before the police stopped the driver was
getting nervous.
When it gets to the driver, the sausage machine prefers
the interpretation represented by the above tree structure
because – obeying the principle of Late Closure _ this NP
is added to the current constituent, as the object of the V
(stopped) inside the VP. This corresponds to a transitive
reading of the verb stopped, with the driver as its object.
In this tree structure, stopped is being used intransitively,
with no explicit object. In this case the first clause is
closed early, after stopped, and the driver is the subject of
the second clause.

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 6. Syntactic category ambiguity

The processor cumulatively links words into a syntactic tree structure as they are encountered. A large proportion of words in all languages are
ambiguous. Many involve category ambiguity, which is when the same word-form may represent more than one syntactic category.
There are cases where the partial tree structure would allow words from more than one category. For example, if the word trains is encountered
in the fragment, it could be either a verb or a noun.
I know that the desert trains….
I know that the desert trains young people to be especially tough.
I know that the desert trains are especially tough on young people.
Reading times for desert trains were longer in this region for the following sentences, where the syntactic category of the ambiguous words is
clear and where syntactic processing can therefore proceed.
I know that this desert trains young people to be especially tough.
I know that these desert trains are especially tough on young people.

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 Exercise

Draw syntactic trees structures to show the two structures

involved for each of the following ambiguous sentences:
1.I saw the astronomer with a telescope.
2.I saw the book that you were reading in the library.
3.Fred realized that Mary left when the party started.

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 7. Cross-linguistic evidence for processing strategies

MacWhinney, Bates and Kliegl (1984), ran a study of English, German and Italian that showed that there
is interaction between strategies and that speakers will use whatever information they an to understand
a sentence. The authors asked native speakers of these three languages to carry out a simple task with
short sentences in their native language. The task was to identify the agent in simple sentences:
The eraser the pig chases.
Licks the cow the goat.
The dog grabs the pencil.
The authors found that native speakers of English relied primarily on word order, native speakers of
German on animacy, and to a lesser extent on noun-verb agreement, and native speakers of Italian on
noun-verb agreement, and to a lesser extent on animacy.

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 7. Cross-linguistic evidence for processing strategies

Ambiguity can arise if there is more than one preceding noun that could be modified by the
relative clause:
The journalist interviewed the daughter of the colonel who had had the accident.
The ambiguity concerns who in fact had the accident – the colonel or his daughter?
Spanish sentence grammar allows the same structure. But for Spanish, native speakers the
preferred interpretation is that the relative clause modifies the first noun la hija.
El periodista entrevistó a la hija del coronel que tuvo el accidente.

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