What I will do:

1
Thinking Language Lecture 3Syntactic
processing IDr Sigrid Lipka

• From a combination of lecture and independent
  study, you should be able to
• Communicate why psychologists study language
  processing.
• Define syntax, syntactic structure, parsing.
• Provide evidence to demonstrate that readers
  compute syntactic structure.
• Describe provide evidence to support Garden
  Path theory.

• What I will do
• Address three questions
• Why study language comprehension?
• What is syntactic structure?
• How do readers compute syntactic structure?
• Outline Garden Path theory of sentence processing

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Syntactic processing I

• Why study language comprehension?
• We use language
• - all the time
• - very fast
• - without much effort
• - even if we dont want to
• (e.g. ignore s.o. on mobile)
• Why bother researching it if its all so easy?

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Syntactic processing I

• BECAUSE
• We use language
• - all the time
• - very fast
• - without much effort
• - even if we dont want to
• (e.g. ignore someone on mobile)
• Psychologists want to know
• What are the mental processes and mental
  mechanisms underlying such smooth performance?

4
Syntactic processing I

• What is syntactic structure?
• Do the following statements make sense?
• The dog bit the man
• Dog man the the bit
• Task demonstrates that readers (and listeners)
  have implicit understanding of rules governing
  permissible word order in their native language.
• Syntax refers to these rules of word order.

5
Syntactic processing I

• Individual words belong to grammatical class
  (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, determiner).
• Syntactic structure describes grammatical
  composition of sentence.
• Parsing describes process of computing syntactic
  structure.

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Syntactic processing I

• Do the following statements have the same
  meaning?
• The dog bit the man
• The man bit the dog.
• Syntax encodes information about who did what to
  whom.
• In order to understand the meaning of an
  utterance, the reader or listener must compute
  its syntactic structure.

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Syntactic processing I

• How do readers compute syntactic structure?
• There are 3 possibilities
• Readers do not compute syntactic structure.
• Readers wait until end of clause or end of
  sentence before assigning syntactic structure.
• Readers make decisions about syntactic structure
  on a word-by-word basis.

8
Syntactic processing I

• ? research strategy
• give people difficult, ambiguous sentences
• Garden Path sentences

9
Syntactic processing I

• Example Garden Path effect
• The horse raced past the crowd stumbled

10
Syntactic processing I

• Garden path sentences
• Garden path sentences contain words or phrases
  that are temporarily ambiguous between
  alternative syntactic analyses.
• Readers initially adopt incorrect analysis and
  experience difficulty at point of syntactic
  disambiguation.

The horse raced past the crowd stumbled
over a branch.
temporarily ambiguous phrase
disambiguating word
11
Syntactic processing I

• Experiments demonstrate that parsing decisions
  are made on (roughly) word-by-word basis.
• Grammaticality decision task experiments.
• Word-by-word (or phrase-by-phrase) self-paced
  reading experiments.

The horse raced past the barn stumbled over
a branch.
354
478
546
689
756
The horse which was raced past the barn stumbled
over a branch.
356
476
540
567
750
376
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Syntactic processing I

• Eye movement monitoring experiments
• During reading
• Direction of gaze is informative about what is
  currently being processed.
• Time spent fixating on word is informative about
  ease of processing.

The horse raced past the barn stumbled
over a branch.
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Syntactic processing I

• Garden path theory of sentence processing
• Frazier Rayner, 1982
• Rayner, Carlson Frazier, 1983
• Explains how readers process temporarily
  ambiguous sentences.
• Initial parsing decisions depend on
• Syntactic knowledge
• 2 parsing principles
• Minimal attachment
• Late closure
• Knowledge about word meanings or context does not
  influence initial parsing decisions.

14
Syntactic processing I

• Minimal attachment
• Construct simplest possible syntactic structure.

The horse raced past the barn
. . .

• 2 options here
• Analyse as active verb and prepositional phrase
• Analyse as relative clause
• -gt Option A is simplest in terms of tree
  structure.
• -gt Minimal attachment requires that readers
  initially
• pursue Option A ( active analysis)

15
Syntactic processing I

• Late closure
• Incorporate new information as part of current
  phrase whenever possible.

• When John jogs, a mile seems a long
  distance.
• When John jogs a mile seems a long
  distance.

• 2 options here
• Analyse as argument of current verb-phrase.
• Analyse as beginning of new clause.
• -gt Late closure requires that readers initially
  pursue option A.

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Syntactic processing I

• In Part II, we will
• Consider experiments which test Garden path
  theory.
• Outline constraint-based theory of sentence
  processing
• Discuss whether knowledge about word meanings
  influences initial parsing decisions
• Discuss whether contextual knowledge influences
  initial parsing decisions