Constraining mismatch in grammar and in sentence comprehension

This study examines English syntax, which is concerned with the study of the ordering of components or constituents in phrases and sentences. The spotlight of investigation was directed toward the ordering of the constituents of noun phrases found in the tale Cinderella. The noun phrases found in the tale were broken down into their constituent parts for two reasons. The first is to reveal the sequential ordering of constituents in noun phrases. Do all noun phrases in the tale follow the following sequential ordering: pre-modifiers + head noun + post=modifiers? Do pre-modifiers consist of determiners and adjectives? What constituents can these determinants be broken into? Do the adjectives consist of one single adjective or a series of adjectives? Do post-modifiers consist of prepositional phrases and relative clauses? How many prepositional phrases did the writer use to post-modify a head noun? How many relative clauses did the writer use to post modify the head noun? Did the writer place prepositional phrases before or after the relative clauses? Are relative clauses reduced or non-reduced in nature? Second, to reveal the types of noun phrases used by the writer of the tale—basic or complex noun phrases. Are most noun phrases used by the writer basic or complex in nature? To attain the research objectives mentioned above, a descriptive method was used. This method attempts to describe and interpret the types and sequential ordering of the constituent parts of noun phrases found in the tale Cinderella.

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with Down syndrome (DS), age 12 to 21 years, and 19 typically developing (TD) children, age 3 to 5 years, matched on syntax comprehension, as measured by TACL-3 Subtests II and III. Of the 5 dependent measures of comprehension, auditory-verbal short-term memory accounted for significant amounts of variance in 4; group membership, 1 (semantic role assignment); and visual short-term memory, 0. In the group with DS, hearing status predicted variation in Grammatical Morphemes (TACL-3 Subtest II). Using the SCT, the authors also investigated the effects of varying sentence voice and supporting visual context on sentence comprehension. SCT performance was significantly poorer in terms of (a) referent selection and semantic role assignment, for passive (vs. active) sentences in both groups, and (b) semantic role assignment in all sentences for the group with DS (vs. the TD group). Vocabulary strengths in the group with DS were found with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Third Edition (L. M. Dunn & L. M. Dunn, 1997) but not the TACL-3 Vocabulary subtest.

Studies on anticipatory processes during sentence comprehension often focus on the prediction of postverbal direct objects. In subject-initial languages (the target of most studies so far), however, the position in the sentence, the syntactic function, and the semantic role of arguments are often conflated. For example, in the sentence “The frog will eat the fly” the syntactic object (“fly”) is at the same time also the last word and the patient argument of the verb. It is therefore not apparent which kind of information listeners orient to for predictive processing during sentence comprehension. A visual world eye tracking study on the verb-initial language Tagalog (Austronesian) tested what kind of information listeners use to anticipate upcoming postverbal linguistic input. The grammatical structure of Tagalog allows to test whether listeners' anticipatory gaze behavior is guided by predictions of the linear order of words, by syntactic functions (e.g., subject/object), or by semantic roles (agent/patient). Participants heard sentences of the type “Eat frog fly” or “Eat fly frog” (both meaning “The frog will eat the fly”) while looking at displays containing an agent referent (“frog”), a patient referent (“fly”) and a distractor. The verb carried morphological marking that allowed the order and syntactic function of agent and patient to be inferred. After having heard the verb, listeners fixated on the agent irrespective of its syntactic function or position in the sentence. While hearing the first-mentioned argument, listeners fixated on the corresponding referent in the display accordingly and then initiated saccades to the last-mentioned referent before it was encountered. The results indicate that listeners used verbal semantics to identify referents and their semantic roles early; information about word order or syntactic functions did not influence anticipatory gaze behavior directly after the verb was heard. In this verb-initial language, event semantics takes early precedence during the comprehension of sentences, while arguments are anticipated temporally more local to when they are encountered. The current experiment thus helps to better understand anticipation during language processing by employing linguistic structures not available in previously studied subject-initial languages.

This study investigated the role of prosody and word order in identifying the focus of sentences in Japanese. Native Japanese speakers listened to sentences with different types of word order (subject–object–verb (SOV) vs. object–subject–verb (OSV)), prosody (whether the first noun phrase is stressed or not) and preceding contexts (object- vs. subject-wh questions), while processing costs were measured using pupillometry. Although syntactically non-basic OSV was more difficult to process than basic SOV, this processing difficulty was considerably reduced when the supportive context (the subject-wh question) required S to be focused. The time–course analysis of pupillometry revealed that the Japanese speakers immediately used prosodic cues to determine the focus of sentences, but the effect of word order cues for focus was delayed until the sentence-final verb was encountered. This study advances our understanding of the temporal dynamics of focus processing and the interplay between syntactic and information structures in sentence comprehension.

This thesis is a reference grammar of the Eibela language, also referred to as Aimele (Ethnologue code: AIL). Eibela has approximately 300 speakers living primarily in Lake Campbell, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The majority of the data for this thesis was gathered in Lake Campbell, with some addition research taking place in Wawoi Falls, Western Province. In Lake Campbell, Eibela is the dominant language of the community, and is the language of day-to-day life. English and Tok Pisin are becoming more prominent as languages of commerce, and are preferred for written communication. Most members of the Lake Campbell community are also adept at speaking the languages of the surrounding communities.

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.

This paper examines the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, with a view to considering their typological similarities and differences. The East Papuan languages are thought to be the descendants of the languages spoken by the original inhabitants of Island Melanesia, who arrived in the area up to 50,000 years ago. The Oceanic Austronesian languages are thought to have come into the area with the Lapita peoples 3,500 years ago. With this historical backdrop in view, our paper seeks to investigate the linguistic relationships between the scattered Papuan languages of Island Melanesia. To do this, we survey various structural features, including syntactic patterns such as constituent order in clauses and noun phrases and other features of clause structure, paradigmatic structures of pronouns, and the structure of verbal morphology. In particular, we seek to discern similarities between the languages that might call for closer investigation, with a view to establishing genetic relatedness between some or all of the languages. In addition, in examining structural relationships between languages, we aim to discover whether it is possible to distinguish between original Papuan elements and diffused Austronesian elements of these languages. As this is a vast task, our paper aims merely to lay the groundwork for investigation into these and related questions.

This research paper presents a detailed analysis of the noun phrases (NP) in War-Khasi and War-Jaiñtia, two varieties of the Khasi language spoken in north-eastern India. The study investigates the syntactic and morphological features of NPs, with a particular emphasis on the distinctions between pre-modifiers and post- modifiers. By comparing and contrasting the NPs of War-Khasi and War-Jaiñtia, the paper highlights the unique attributes and functions of these constructions in each variety. The research also explores the various constructions of NPs in both varieties and evaluates their syntactic and semantic roles. The findings demonstrate that while both varieties share similar NP constructions, there are notable differences in the functions and attributes of NPs in each variety. Furthermore, the paper elaborates on the different functions of NPs and their lexical elements, including the head noun and all of its accompanying modifiers. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of the syntax and morphology of noun phrases in Khasi and provides insights into the unique linguistic features of these two varieties. The findings have important implications for cross-linguistic comparisons of NP constructions and for further research in the field of linguistics of the Khasi varieties.

Native (L1) and second-language (L2) sentence processing can sometimes be shallow. A Good-Enough approach suggests that speakers may engage in shallow processing if the task permits. This study tests English native speakers and native Chinese L2 learners of English to explore whether different task demands affect their sentence processing. In a self-paced reading task, participants read globally or temporarily ambiguous sentences with relative clauses preceded by a matrix clause containing two noun phrases (NPs). Comprehension questions modulated task difficulty: Half the participants received comprehension questions that probed their interpretation of the relative clauses whereas the remaining half received superficial questions unrelated to the relative clauses. Task difficulty affected reading times at the point of disambiguation for both L1 and L2 participants. Additionally, participants’ attachment choices for globally ambiguous sentences were consistent with reading times of the disambiguating region in both L1 and L2 readers. The results suggest that both L1 and L2 syntactic processing is modulated by the task at hand. We argue for a similar treatment of shallowness for L1 and L2 speakers in models of sentence processing, along the lines of the Good-Enough approach to language processing.

The present study evaluated a two-mechanism memory model of the online auditory comprehension of object relative (OR) sentences in 7–11-year-old typically developing children. Mechanisms of interest included working memory storage (WMS) and attention focus switching. We predicted that both mechanisms would be important for comprehension. Forty-four children completed a listening span task indexing WMS, an auditory attention focus switching task, and an agent selection task indexing spoken sentence comprehension. Regression analyses indicated that WMS and attention focus switching accuracy each accounted for significant and unique variance in the children’s OR comprehension after accounting for age. Results were interpreted to suggest that WMS is important for OR comprehension by supporting children’s ability to retain both noun phrase 1 and noun phrase 2 prior to their reactivating noun phrase 1 from memory in order to integrate it into a developing structure. Attention focus switching was interpreted to be critical in supporting children’s noun phrase 1 reactivation, as they needed to switch their focus of attention momentarily away from ongoing language processing to memory retrieval.

Two new treatments, 1 based on sentence to picture matching (SPM) and the other on object manipulation (OM), that train participants on the thematic roles of sentences using pictures or by manipulating objects were piloted. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design, sentence comprehension was trained on the affected sentence type in 1 task-related protocol in 15 participants with aphasia. The 2 tasks were SPM and OM; the treatment stimuli were object relatives, object clefts, passives, and unaccusatives, as well as two control structures-object relatives with a complex noun phrase (NP) and active sentences with three NPs. The criteria for efficacious treatment was an increase in the level of performance from the pretreatment probes to the posttreatment probes for the treated structure such that accuracy rose from at or below chance to above chance and either (a) accuracy rose by 33% or (b) the effect size was 2.6. Based on these criteria, the success rate for training the target structure was 2/6 participants in the SPM condition and 4/7 participants in the OM condition. The outcome of this study illustrates the utility of this theoretically motivated and efficacious treatment for sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia.

This paper describes the treatment of nominalizations in the PUNDIT text processing system. A single semantic definition is used for both nominalizations and the verbs to which they are related, with the same semantic roles, decompositions, and selectional restrictions on the semantic roles. However, because syntactically nominalizations are noun phrases, the processing which produces the semantic representation is different in several respects from that used for clauses. (1) The rules relating the syntactic positions of the constituents to the roles that they can fill are different. (2) The fact that nominalizations are untensed while clauses normally are tensed means that an alternative treatment of time is required for nominalizations. (3) Because none of the arguments of a nominalization is syntactically obligatory, some differences in the control of the filling of roles are required, in particular, roles can be filled as part of reference resolution for the nominalization. The differences in processing are captured by allowing the semantic interpreter to operate in two different modes, one for clauses, and one for nominalizations. Because many nominalizations are noun-noun compounds, this approach also addresses this problem, by suggesting a way of dealing with one relatively tractable subset of noun-noun compounds.

When a noun phrase could either be the object of the preceding verb or the subject of a new clause or a sentence complement, readers and listeners show a strong preference to parse the noun phrase as the object of the verb. This can result in clear garden paths for sentences such as The student read the book was stolen and While the student read the book was stolen. Even when the verb does not permit a noun phrase complement, some processing difficulty is still found. This has led some theorists to propose models in which initial attachments are lexically blind, with lexical information subsequently used as a filter to evaluate and revise initial analyses. In contrast, we show that these results emerge naturally from constraint-based lexicalist models. We present a modeling experiment with a simple recurrent network that was trained to predict upcoming complements for a sample of verbs taken from the Penn Treebank corpus. The model exhibits an object bias and it also shows effects of verb frequency which are similar to those found in the psycholinguistic literature.

Problem statement: Any Arabic to English Machine Translation (MT) system should be capable of dealing with word order which Arabic exhibits. This poses a significant challenge to MT due to the vast number of ways to express the same sentence in Arabic. The ordering features are very important and should be carefully applied to ensure the generation of sentence in the target language. Because they apply to the target language, it shoul d fulfill the specific requirement of this language . Mistakes in the MT output can be either the result of analysis problems at the source language level, or due to generation problem at target language level. Word order rules are crucial for the generation of sentences in the target language. They also serve a s rules for the ordering of sentence constituents. These rules draw their information from the syntact ic knowledge. The word order problem becomes more obvious when making machine translation between languages that have rich morphological variations. Approach: The main objective of this research is to develop a machine translation that translates Arabic noun phrases into English by usin g transfer-based approach. A system called Npae- Rbmt has been developed in this research. Transfer- based machine translation is one instance of rule- based machine-translation approaches and is current ly one of the most widely used methods of machine translation. The idea of transfer-based mac hine translation it is necessary to have an intermediate representation that captures the mean ing of the original sentence in order to generate the correct translation. Using advantages of transf er-based machine translation such as analysis step, the Transfer-based becomes simpler as linguistic an alysis goes deeper-as the representation of analysi s step becomes more abstract. In fact, a major goal o f MT research is to define a level of analysis whic h is so deep in which transfer-based machine translat ion is able to do. Results: The method was tested on 88 thesis titles and journals from the computer science domain. The accuracy of the result was 94.6%. These results proved the viability of this a pproach for distant languages. Conclusion: Based on the achieved results, we have managed to perform th e syntactic reordering within an Arabic noun phrases to English translation task by using transf er-based machine translation and also achieved reasonable improvements in translation quality over related approach.

O objetivo do presente artigo é examinar, com base na Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), o comportamento de sintagmas nominais com ordenações não canônicas de suas partes constituintes, denominados descontínuos por Keizer (2007), bem como investigar as motivações que ativam a descontinuidade. Para tanto, elegem-se dois princípios de ordenação: o de complexidade estrutural e o de peso comunicativo. Ambos podem favorecer uma mesma ordem, mas, quando eles entrarem em competição e favorecerem ordens diferentes, o falante irá selecionar a ordenação que melhor cumpre seu propósito comunicativo. A partir de dados extraídos do córpus IBORUNA, foram analisadas 77 ocorrências de sintagmas nominais descontínuos. O resultado da análise aponta para a prevalência do princípio de peso comunicativo na determinação da ordem dos constituintes do SN.