Another Kind of Temporary Structural Ambiguity

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Another Kind of Temporary Structural Ambiguity

• Marge Schott, managing partner of the
  Cincinnati Reds, at first did not want to
  apologize for her remark that Hitlerwas good at
  the beginning but he just went too far. Under
  pressure, she finally said that she regretted her
  remarks offended many people.
• - NY Times, 7/21/96,
• D. Tannen, Im sorry, I wont apologize

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The referees warned the spectators
against heckling the other team.
would probably get too rowdy.

• Temporary ambiguity about relationship
• between

- Is the noun a - Direct Object (DO) ( Minimal
Attachment), or - Subject of an Embedded Clause
( NMA)?
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Verb Bias

• Verbs differ in how often theyre used in
  particular sentence structures
• Compare The referees warned the spectators ...
• with The bus driver worried the
  passengers ...

warned Direct-Object Biased Verb
worried Clause-Biased Verb Does a
verb's most likely use guide initial
choices about the interpretation of words
following it?
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Plausibility of Nounas Direct Object

• Plausibility of particular Verb Noun combos in
  particular relationships vary
• Compare The referees warned the spectators ...
• with The referees warned the game ...
• Meaning of game completely rules out DO
  possibility
• Does that lead people to expect a verb following
  game because it must be the beginning of an
  embedded clause?
• If yes, how long does it take to develop that
  expectation?

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Example Stimuli(Garnsey et al., 1997)

• DO-Bias Verbs (warned, discovered, heard, )
• The referees warned (that) the spectators would
  probably get too rowdy.
• The referees warned (that) the game would
  probably go into overtime.
• Clause-Bias Verbs (worried, realized, suspected,
  )
• The bus driver worried (that) the passengers were
  starting to get annoyed.
• The bus driver worried (that) the tires
  were starting to go flat.
• Equi-Bias Verbs (regretted, predicted, knew, )
• The senior senator regretted (that) the decision
  had ever been made public.
• The senior senator regretted (that) the reporter
  had ever seen the report.

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Stimulus Norming Control
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First-Pass Reading Time Sum of all fixations
in a region before leaving the region
- Used as a measure of initial processing
enough 112 177 289 ms healthy
196 ms Regression-Path Time Sum of all
First-Pass fixations in a region any
regressions from that region to earlier
regions, up until move past region to right
- Used to measure processing triggered by a
region up until ready to move on seem
244 196 175 615 ms
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Reading Time Results(Same pattern in
button-pushing moving window eyetracking first
pass)

• DO-Bias Verbs
• The referees warned the spectators would probably
  get too rowdy.
• The referees warned the game would
  probably go into overtime.
• Clause-Bias Verbs
• The bus driver worried the passengers were
  starting to get annoyed.
• The bus driver worried the tires were
  starting to go flat.
• Equi-Bias Verbs
• The senior senator regretted the decision had
  ever been made public.
• The senior senator regretted the reporter had
  ever seen the report.

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Verbs Rule

• No immediate effect of Plausibility of V N
  combination when V had a strong bias
• But Plausibility did have an immediate effect
  when no V-bias
• So, the two factors interact, with Verb Bias
  dominating the interaction
• Consistent with Constraint-Satisfaction Models,
  with some kinds of constraints being more
  influential

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Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) Language

• N400 (Plausibility, Contextual fit)
• Negative, 400 msec
• Centro-parietal maximum, sometimes larger on
  right
• P600 (Garden-paths, grammar errors, complexity,)
• Positive, gt500 msec
• Centro-parietal maximum

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Stimulus Presentationin ERP Study
Were the referees expecting a long game?
READY 1
The
referees
warned
the
game
would
probably
go
into
overtime.
QUESTION
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(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
15
(No Transcript)
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Verbs still rule. Why?

• Principled reasons
• They provide the most useful information
• Information about them may be simply retrieved,
  while plausibility requires combining information
  from multiple words
• More accidental reasons
• They precede the critical nouns in these
  sentences
• but, see Trueswell (1996)
• They generally appear early in English sentences,
  leading English speakers to rely on them

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Back to Usual Issues

• Effect of plausibility supports Interactive
  Constraint-Satisfaction Models
• With some kinds of info outweighing /or
  available earlier than others
• Any evidence about Serial vs Parallel?
• Reliable correlations between RT at
  disambiguation strength of bias toward less
  preferred structure when plausibility supported
  the less-preferred structure
• Clause-bias V Plausible-as-DO N
• - Difficulty increased as DO-bias strength of V
  increased (r .53)
• DO-bias V Implausible-as-DO N
• - Difficulty decreased as Cl-bias strength of V
  increased (r -.58)
• Strongly suggests weighing both options
  parallelism

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GP Modelers Response

• Studies show various factors make easier the
  structures predicted by GP Model to be hard
• So, all of these effects COULD be during 2nd
  stage reanalysis, since should only try harder
  option when forced to reanalyze
• To be definitive, need to show that same factors
  can make harder the structures predicted by GP
  Model to be easier
• Then effects cant be due to reanalysis, since no
  reanalysis should be necessary