Online Sentence Processing During Reading of Temporally Ambiguous Gapping Sentences in Brazilian Portuguese / Processamento online na leitura de sentenças elípticas gapping com ambiguidade temporária no Português Brasileiro

This article aims to explore whether the online sentence processing of gapping sentences, with a temporary ambiguous DP at the second conjunct, such as “Beatriz baked a pizza and Carla a lemon cake for snack”, is more costing in terms of time course in comparison to other two coordinated sentences, coordinate with conjoined object such as “Beatriz baked a pizza and a lemon cake for snack in the afternoon”, and coordinate with conjoined clauses without ellipsis, such as “Beatriz baked a pizza and Carla made a lemon juice”. A Self-Paced Reading task in moving-window fashion was carried out with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The results seem to indicate that temporary ambiguous DP and the resolution of the ellipsis site were more costly to process int comparison to the other two coordinated sentences.Keywords: Sentence Processing; Ellipsis; Gapping; Brazilian Portuguese. Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo explorar se o processamento online de sentenças elípticas gapping, com ambiguidade temporária do DP que inicia a segunda oração, como em “A Beatriz assou a pizza e a Carla o bolo de limão pro lanche”, é mais custoso em comparação com outros dois tipos de sentenças coordenadas, estrutura com coordenação de objetos como em “A Beatriz assou a pizza e o bolo de limão pro lanche da tarde”, e estrutura com sentenças coordenadas sem elipse, como em “A Beatriz assou a pizza e a Carla preparou um suco de limão”. Aplicou-se uma tarefa de Leitura Automonitorada, com design moving-window a falantes do Português Brasileiro. Os resultados indicam que a ambiguidade temporária do DP e a resolução da elipse do verbo foram mais custosas no processamento em comparação com as outras duas sentenças coordenadas.Palavras-chave: Processamento de Sentenças; Elipse; Gapping; Português Brasileiro.

Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.

Cost of ungrammatical predictions during online sentence processing: evidence against surprisal

The surprisal metric (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) successfully predicts syntactic complexity in a large number of online studies (e.g., Demberg and Keller, 2009; Levy and Keller, 2013). Surprisal assumes a probabilistic grammar that drives the expectation of upcoming linguistic material. Consequently, wrong predictions lead to a processing cost, presumably due to reranking related computations (Levy, 2013). Critically, surprisal assumes that the predicted parses generated by the probabilistic grammar are grammatical. However, it has been found that syntactic predictions can be ungrammatical (e.g., Apurva & Husain, 2018). Consequently, similar to reranking costs incurred due to incorrect (grammatical) predictions, a cost should also appear for ungrammatical predictions. Evidence for such a cost during comprehension will not be explained by the surprisal metric. To test the ecological validity of the surprisal metric, it becomes critical to investigate if ungrammatical predictions incur a cost. In this study, we investigate this issue in Hindi (a verb-final language) using a cloze task followed by a self-paced reading (SPR) study. All analyses were carried out in R using linear mixed models. Log RTs (reading time) were used for the RT analyses. In the cloze study (N=30), participants were asked to complete the sentences (such as 1a, 1b) meaningfully using the SPR paradigm. The two conditions differed in the case markers on the three nouns. 12 sets of experimental items along with 64 fillers were used. Participants’ responses were coded for the predicted verb class and the overall grammaticality of the completion (grammatical prediction vs ungrammatical prediction). 1a. hari-ne geeta-se umesh-ko…. Hari-ERG Geeta=ABL Umesh=ACC. 1b. hari-ko geeta-ne umesh-ko …. Hari-ACC Geeta-ERG Umesh-ACC. Grammaticality analysis of the completion data showed that participants make more ungrammatical completions in conditions (b) compared to (a) (z=5.25). The overall grammatical completions in condition (a) was 96% while in (b) it was 60%. In addition, the verb class analysis showed that in both conditions participants completed the sentences with a transitive non-finite verb followed by a ditransitive matrix verb (hereafter T.NF-DT.M) most frequently. T.NF-DT.M were predicted in 33% instance in condition (a) and 34% in condition (b) (z=0.18). Given the similar cloze probabilities, the surprisal metric will predict no difference in RT at T.NF-DT.M in the two conditions during online processing (cloze probabilities can be used to compute surprisal, see Levy and Keller, 2013). If the RTs at T.NF-DT.M in condition (a) is less than (b) that would be better explained by the higher cost due to the ungrammatical prediction. To ascertain this, we conducted an SPR study (n=50) using items similar to the ones used in the previous experiment (see, 2a and 2b). The critical region was T.NF-DT.M. 24 set of items along with 72 fillers were constructed. 2a hari-ne geeta-se umesh-ko milne ko kaha, Hari-ERG Geeta=ABL Umesh=ACC meet-inf(T.NF) told(DT.M) 2b hari-ko geeta-ne umesh-ko milne ko kaha , ... Hari-ACC Geeta=ERG Umesh=ACC meet-inf(T.NF) told(DT.M) While the prediction of T.NF-DT.M is the same in the two conditions, % ungrammatical predictions are more in (b) vs (a). Results show that the RT in (a) < (b) at the critical region (t=2.32). This goes against the surprisal metric and shows the cost incurred due to ungrammatical predictions. Our work establishes that the cost of ungrammatical predictions indeed appears during online processing. This processing cost is not predicted by a metric like surprisal and highlights its limitations. This study also provides evidence against the robust predictions in head-final languages. It suggests that the prediction mechanism in such languages is more nuanced and points to the need to study the nature of ungrammatical predictions during processing.

Verb Metaphoric Extension Under Semantic Strain

This paper explores the processes underlying verb metaphoric extension. Work on metaphor processing has largely focused on noun metaphor, despite evidence that verb metaphor is more common (e.g., Krennmayr, 2011). Across three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that verb metaphoric extensions arise when a verb-noun pairing results in semantic strain. Experiment 1 showed that verbs are more likely than nouns to alter their meaning under semantic strain (the verb mutability effect). Participants paraphrased simple intransitive sentences like The motor complained (sample paraphrase: The engine revved loudly). We developed a novel methodology of using word2vec to assess the degree of semantic change that occurred from initial sentence to paraphrase for both nouns and verbs. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the verb mutability effect was chiefly due to online meaning adjustments, rather than to differences in polysemy between nouns and verbs. In Experiment 3, we replicated the word2vec results with an assessment using human subjects. The results also showed that nouns and verbs change meaning in qualitatively different ways, with verbs more likely to change meaning metaphorically, and nouns more likely to change meaning taxonomically or metonymically. These findings bear on the origin and processing of verb metaphors and provide a link between online sentence processing and diachronic change over language evolution.

The Effect of Mood on Predictive Sentence Processing by Older Adults

This study examined the effect of mood on predictive sentence processing by older adults. A self-paced reading task was implemented among a group of younger adults and older adults to measure their performance in online sentence processing. Half of the sentences were highly predictable, whereas the other half were lowly predictable. Music was used to induce positive or negative mood. Results show that in the positive mood condition, highly predictable sentences were processed more efficiently than lowly predictable sentences in both older and younger adults, but no significant age difference was found in the effect of predictability. In the negative mood condition, younger adults processed highly predictable sentences more efficiently than lowly predictable sentences, but there was no significant difference in reading times between the different types of sentences in older adults. The findings suggest that predictive sentence processing might be inhibited by negative mood in older adults. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Processing linguistic negation with and without truth-value evaluation: Evidence from N400 and theta oscillations

How linguistic negation is processed online has been a long-standing issue in psycho- and neurolinguistics. In this study, we investigated negation processing in two distinct types of sentences with truth value evaluation (e.g., ‘A robin is a/not a bird’), and without (e.g., ‘The woman reads a/no book’), focusing on electroencephalogram (EEG) indices in terms of the N400 component and oscillatory power and inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC). Across both sentence constructions, we observed enhanced N400 and increased ITPC in the theta band for semantically unrelated target words, irrespective of negation. However for the theta power, we observed distinct modulation effects of negation on semantic-relatedness for two types of sentence constructions. In addition, we showed that direct comparison between affirmative and negative target words led to effects in the N400 and theta power in a nuanced manner. Our findings provide novel evidence on a more interactive role of negation during online sentence processing.

Overt and covert prosody are reflected in neurophysiological responses previously attributed to grammatical processing

Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing (e.g., Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, & Poeppel, 2016). Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at sentence constituent frequencies reflect cortical tracking of overt or covert (implicit) prosodic grouping. In three experiments, participants listened to series of sentences while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. First, prosodic cues in the sentence materials were neutralized. We found an EEG spectral power peak elicited at a frequency that only ‘tagged’ covert prosodic change, but not any major syntactic constituents. In the second experiment, participants listened to a series of sentences with overt prosodic grouping cues that either aligned or misaligned with the syntactic phrasing in the sentences (initial overt prosody trials). Immediately after each overt prosody trial, participants were presented with a second series of sentences (covert prosody trial) with all overt prosodic cues neutralized and asked to imagine the prosodic contour present in the previous, overt prosody trial. The EEG responses reflected an interactive relationship between syntactic processing and prosodic tracking at the frequencies of syntactic constituents (sentences and phrases): alignment of syntax and prosody boosted EEG responses, whereas their misalignment had an opposite effect. This was true for both overt and covert (imagined) prosody. We conclude that processing of both overt and covert prosody is reflected in the frequency tagged neural responses at sentence constituent frequencies, whereas identifying neural markers that are narrowly reflective of syntactic processing remains difficult and controversial.