Learning via Processing: Structural Priming Across Grammatical Structures and Languages in Early Second Language Development

This study investigated inverse preference effects in L2 structural priming of English relative clauses and their potential influences on subsequent learning of target structures. One hundred fourteen Chinese learners of English at a low-to-intermediate proficiency level participated in a structural priming experiment with a pretest-posttest design. The experimental group underwent a priming task in which they orally produced syntactic structures immediately after viewing English object or passive relative clauses as primes, whereas the control group only read sentences unrelated to English relative clauses. A grammaticality judgment task and a sentence completion task were used to measure the inverse preference effect and its subsequent effects on L2 learning. The results showed the presence of structural priming and inverse preference effects in immediate production, which extended to subsequent learning of L2. In subsequent grammaticality judgments and production, L2 learners performed better with English object relative clauses than with English passive relative clauses in comparison with the pretest. The results are discussed in terms of the structural frequency in both L1 and L2 as well as the implicit learning mechanisms of structural priming.

The Processing of Locally Ambiguous Relative Clauses in German

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., "Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing"). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5-6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., "where is the tractor that the car is following") to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.

Frontiers Events is a rapidly growing calendar management system dedicated to the scheduling of academic events. This includes announcements and invitations, participant listings and search functionality, abstract handling and publication, related events and post-event exchanges. Whether an organizer or participant, make your event a Frontiers Event!

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. "Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?"). Two RC types, classifier (CL) and ge3 RCs, were tested in a between-participants design. The two RC types differ in their syntactic analyses and frequency of occurrence, providing an important point of comparison for theories of RC acquisition and processing. A permutation analysis showed that the two structures were processed differently: CL RCs showed a significant object-over-subject advantage, whereas ge3 RCs showed the opposite effect. This study shows that children can have different preferences even for two very similar RC structures within the same language, suggesting that syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the unique features of particular constructions both within and across different linguistic typologies.

This study investigates the comprehension and production of relative clauses and passive sentences by a group of 10 university students with dyslexia in order to check their competence of marked word orders. Comprehension was tested through the oral modality using picture and agent selection tasks, and production was tested using oral elicitation tasks. The results show that relative clauses are comprehended and produced with difficulty, whereas passive sentences are more preserved, particularly as far as comprehension is concerned. The greater difficulty experienced with (object) relative clauses can be attributed to a specific deficit affecting the structures involving A-bar movement and regarding the length of the syntactic dependency, which places a heavy load on the computational system.

This paper reports on a study on the typical characterization of syntactic impairment in relative clauses found in a patient diagnosed with non-fluent aphasia or also known as Broca ‘s aphasia at National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM), Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The study adopts the theory of Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding Theory that consist of (D)eep Structure and (S)urface Structure as a framework for the description of syntactic impairment and adopts an influential hypothesis by Grodzinsky’s (1990) Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) concerning agrammatism. The sentence structure used in this study is syntactically identical to the base order subject-verb-object (SVO) except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence known as derived order that will result to the formation of object-subject-verb (OSV) in English, and thus enable examination of syntactic movement in agrammatic comprehension. This study involves one patient with non-fluent aphasia, native speaker of Tamil and speaker of English as second language from NASAM, performing a sentence - to-picture matching test. This study reveals the patient’s comprehension of subject relative clauses (SVO structure) are significantly above chance level, but object relative clauses (OSV structure) are at chance level. This study reveals that the score obtained by the patient is within the percentage and performance level (standard norm) proposed by Grodzinsky. These results also show that the non-fluent aphasic patient’s ability to comprehend the relative clauses that involve movement of a noun phrase is impaired.

Syntactic priming and the lexical boost effect during sentence production and sentence comprehension: An fMRI study

Abstract. This paper discusses morphological and syntactic aspects of relative clauses in two related Southern Bantu language groups. In Sotho‐Tswana, object relative clauses are formed by means of clause‐initial relative complementisers which agree with the head noun. In contrast, object relatives in the Nguni languages are formed by means of relative concords which are attached to the relative clause predicate and express agreement with the subject. I suggest that the Nguni relative concords are the result of a grammaticalisation process in which early Nguni relative complementisers first turned into clitics and then into relative concords. On the basis of a detailed analysis of this process I further argue that the syntactic difference between Sotho‐Tswana and Nguni relative clauses is correlated with a morphological difference between nouns in these languages.

This study investigated syntactic priming of relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in monolingual Turkish speakers through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RC attachment preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universal principles but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth their assumptions about the universality of the parser and the underlying mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and the sources of information used in sentence processing.  However, there is not one single model, the predictions of which could account for all the contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studies using different materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC attachment preferences further in detail, we conducted two offline (pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (self-paced reading) task. The results showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachment preferences on condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RC attachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic associations of the host NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), and techniques (e.g. offline or online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic priming showed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical configuration of the alternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the results suggested that a tendency towards NP1 attachment preference might be attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimize cognitive demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs. passive), task requirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or directed attention vs. implicit processing).

First paragraph: MacDonald (2013) proposes that distributional properties of language and processing biases in language comprehension can to a large extent be attributed to consequences of the language production process. In essence, the account is derived from the principle of least effort that was formulated by Zipf, among others (Zipf, 1949; Levelt, 2013). However, in Zipf's view the outcome of the least effort principle was a compromise between least effort for the speaker and least effort for the listener, whereas MacDonald puts most of the burden on the production process.

Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

The present study investigates the relationship between working memory (WM) and second language (L2) sentence processing, specifically focusing on the comprehension of English relative clauses (RCs). While previous studies have observed that object RCs typically impose greater cognitive demands than subject RCs, the role of WM in mediating this difficulty remains unclear. To investigate this relationship, we employed a self-paced reading method to assess reading times and comprehension accuracy among advanced Korean learners of English. WM was measured using both digit span and reading span tasks. Results revealed that higher WM was associated with faster reading speeds and better comprehension across RC types. Although object RCs took longer to process, there was a lack of a significant interaction between WM and RC types. Peak reading times were observed at region 4 (corresponding to the object position in subject RCs and the main verb position in object RCs). This pattern diverges from previous research findings and suggests that advanced learners engage in proactive resource allocation. These results emphasize WM’s role in L2 sentence processing and indicate processing strategies for improving learners’ management of complex syntactic structures.

This paper discusses the syntax of relative clauses in European Portuguese (EP) by focussing on the status of the relativizer que in restrictive and appositive relative clauses. We propose a unified account of que in terms of a D-element and discuss the syntactic implications of this assumption for an adequate analysis of relative clauses in EP. We assume that relative que has properties of demonstrative and interrogative determiners. In restrictive object and subject relative clauses, que occurs as a transitive determiner [DP que [NP e]], which selects for a nominal complement, whereas in prepositional and appositive relative clauses, [DP que] is an intransitive determiner parallel to an e-type pronoun. We discuss the position of restrictive relative clauses in the DP containing the modified noun, and propose that they are merged pre-nominally, in the same fashion as demonstratives.

We usually teach the relative clause in German by first introducing the concept in English1 and setting down structural rules: find and drop the noun phrase that corresponds to the antecedent, select the appropriate relative pronoun and place it first in the clause. Thus, the English sentences That is the man/We visited him in Biberach are reduced to a main clause and relative clause by dropping him and introducing the clause with the relative pronoun appropriate to the antecedent (human or nonhuman) and to the syntax of the relative clause in case: That is the man whom we visited in Biberach. We then apply similar rules to German. The sentences Das ist der Mann/Wir haben ihn in Biberach besucht are reduced to a main clause and relative clause by dropping ihn, supplying the corresponding relative pronoun with the gender and the number from the antecedent and the case from the syntax of the relative clause, placing the relative pronoun first in the clause, and placing the verb last: Das ist der Mann, den wir in Biberach besucht haben. This approach to teaching the relative clause can be found in popular textbooks from the structurally oriented German: A Structural Approach2 to the more conversationally oriented Alles Gute.3 While this is a direct presentation, it is complicated, for it requires the students to learn an intricate pattern of replacement and transformation in order to arrive at a grammatical structure that they may not fully understand. The problem, then, is to devise a simpler method of introducing the relative clause that will also give the students an understanding for just what it means.