Constituent order and semantic parallelism in online comprehension: Eye-tracking evidence from German

Reading times for the second conjunct of and-coordinated clauses are faster when the second conjunct parallels the first conjunct in its syntactic or semantic (animacy) structure than when its structure differs (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Frazier, Taft, Roeper, & Clifton, 1984). What remains unclear, however, is the time course of parallelism effects, their scope, and the kinds of linguistic information to which they are sensitive. Findings from the first two eye-tracking experiments revealed incremental constituent order parallelism across the board—both during structural disambiguation (Experiment 1) and in sentences with unambiguously case-marked constituent order (Experiment 2), as well as for both marked and unmarked constituent orders (Experiments 1 and 2). Findings from Experiment 3 revealed effects of both constituent order and subtle semantic (noun phrase similarity) parallelism. Together our findings provide evidence for an across-the-board account of parallelism for processing and-coordinated clauses, in which both constituent order and semantic aspects of representations contribute towards incremental parallelism effects. We discuss our findings in the context of existing findings on parallelism and priming, as well as mechanisms of sentence processing.

[1]  A D Friederici,et al.  Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An analysis with event-related potentials , 1995, Memory & cognition.

[2]  John Hale,et al.  The Information Conveyed by Words in Sentences , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[3]  Robin K. Morris,et al.  The use of thematic role information in parsing: Syntactic processing autonomy revisited , 2003 .

[4]  Marc Brysbaert,et al.  Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records , 1995 .

[5]  K. Rayner.  Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[6]  M W Crocker,et al.  Wide-Coverage Probabilistic Sentence Processing , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[7]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface , 2000, Linguistic Inquiry.

[8]  M. Pickering,et al.  Plausibility and recovery from garden paths: An eye-tracking study , 1998 .

[9]  M. Pickering,et al.  Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution , 1998 .

[10]  R. Schvaneveldt,et al.  Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[11]  Jacob Cohen.  Measurement Educational and Psychological Educational and Psychological Measurement Eta-squared and Partial Eta-squared in Fixed Factor Anova Designs Educational and Psychological Measurement Additional Services and Information For , 2022 .

[12]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Interaction with context during human sentence processing , 1988, Cognition.

[13]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation , 1996, Cogn. Sci..

[14]  Roger P. G. van Gompel,et al.  Reanalysis in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Current Constraint-Based and Two-Stage Models , 2001 .

[15]  Simon P. Liversedge,et al.  Chapter 3 – Eye Movements and Measures of Reading Time , 1998 .

[16]  Barbara Hemforth,et al.  Kognitives Parsing: Repräsentation und Verarbeitung sprachlichen Wissens , 1993, DISKI.

[17]  Pia Knoeferle,et al.  Processing Parallel Structure: Evidence from Eye-Tracking and a Computational Model , 2007 .

[18]  Bradley L. Pritchett.  Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance , 1992 .

[19]  E. Marshall,et al.  NIMH: caught in the line of fire without a general , 1995, Science.

[20]  Matthias Schlesewsky,et al.  The Subject Preference in the Processing of Locally Ambiguous WH-Questions in German , 2000 .

[21]  K Carlson,et al.  The Effects of Parallelism and Prosody in the Processing of Gapping Structures , 2001, Language and speech.

[22]  Angela D. Friederici,et al.  The Processing of Locally Ambiguous Relative Clauses in German , 1995 .

[23]  B. McElree,et al.  A content-addressable pointer mechanism underlies comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis , 2008 .

[24]  M. Anisfeld,et al.  On the functions of structural paraphrase: The view from the passive voice. , 1973 .

[25]  R. Levy.  Expectation-based syntactic comprehension , 2008, Cognition.

[26]  Christoph Scheepers,et al.  Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension , 2007, Cognitive Psychology.

[27]  Christoph Scheepers,et al.  Constituent order priming from reading to listening: a visual-world study , 2004 .

[28]  Matthew W. Crocker,et al.  Ambiguity Resolution in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Frequency-Based Accounts , 2000 .

[29]  Christopher Kennedy,et al.  Structural economy in the processing and representation Of gapping sentences , 2005 .

[30]  Markus Bader,et al.  Subject-Object Ambiguities in German Embedded Clauses: An Across-the-Board Comparison , 1999 .

[31]  Elisabeth Dévière,et al.  Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R , 2009 .

[32]  K. Rayner,et al.  Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity , 1986, Memory & cognition.

[33]  Frank Keller,et al.  A Probabilistic Corpus-based Model of Syntactic Parallelism a Probabilistic Corpus-based Model of Syntactic Parallelism 2 , 2022 .

[34]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Parsing Coordinates and Ellipsis: Copy α , 2001 .

[35]  Thomas G. Bever,et al.  Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules , 2001 .

[36]  T. Jaeger,et al.  Categorical Data Analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards Logit Mixed Models. , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[37]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[38]  Holly P Branigan,et al.  Priming prepositional-phrase attachment during comprehension. , 2005, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[39]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[40]  M. Coltheart,et al.  The quarterly journal of experimental psychology , 1985 .

[41]  Lars Konieczny,et al.  The Role of Lexical Heads in Parsing: Evidence from German , 1997 .

[42]  M. Pickering,et al.  The Representation of Verbs: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Language Production , 1998 .

[43]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model , 1978, Cognition.

[44]  C. Clifton,et al.  Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension , 1984, Memory & cognition.

[45]  Elisabeth Selkirk,et al.  Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure , 1984 .

[46]  M. Pickering,et al.  Syntactic priming in language production , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[47]  L Frazier,et al.  Processing Coordinate Structures , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[48]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension , 2009, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[49]  Robin K. Morris,et al.  Processing Subject and Object Relative Clauses: Evidence from Eye Movements , 2002 .

[50]  M. Traxler,et al.  Syntactic Priming in Comprehension , 2007, Psychological science.

[51]  M. Crocker.  Computational Psycholinguistics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Language , 1995 .

[52]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension , 1998 .

[53]  J. Trueswell.  THE ROLE OF LEXICAL FREQUENCY IN SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION , 1996 .

[54]  Herman Aguinis,et al.  Cautionary Note on Reporting Eta-Squared Values from Multifactor ANOVA Designs , 2004 .

[55]  K Rayner,et al.  Regressive eye movements and sentence parsing: On the use of regression-contingent analyses , 1994, Memory & cognition.

[56]  Matthew J Traxler,et al.  Lexically independent priming in online sentence comprehension , 2008, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[57]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Semantic Influences On Parsing: Use of Thematic Role Information in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution , 1994 .

[58]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[59]  Matthias Schlesewsky,et al.  Contextual information modulates initial processes of syntactic integration: the role of inter- versus intrasentential predictions. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[60]  John Hale,et al.  A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model , 2001, NAACL.

[61]  V. Carey,et al.  Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-Plus , 2001 .

[62]  A. Garnham,et al.  Avoiding the garden path: Eye movements in context , 1992 .

[63]  K. Rayner,et al.  Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences , 1982, Cognitive Psychology.