Understanding the structure & meaning of sentences

What is syntax

the set of rules that govern how words are arranged to form phrases and sentences in a language

What is parsing

the process of analysing the structure of a sentence by breaking it down into its grammatical components to understand its meaning

What does syntactic structure describe

describes the grammatical composition of sentence

Give an example of how sentences can sometimes be “globally” ambiguous

“Visiting relatives can be boring.”

• “Participial phrase” analysis: the relatives who visit are boring

• “Gerund phrase” analysis: the act of visiting relatives can be boring

How do we analyse sentences

roughly a word at a time

What type of ambiguity can be a considerable source of difficulty in reading

local ambiguity

What type of task provides a good indication of reader’s sensitivity to ambiguity

‘stop making sense’ task

What is the ‘stop making sense’ task used for

used to study sentence processing and parsing, especially when readers detect that a sentence becomes ungrammatical or meaningless

What do two other methods involve when assessing sentence processing

• other methods involve measuring time taken to make judgments about sentence acceptability and time taken to read portions of text

• other methods involve studying eye movements during reading or in visual world paradigm

What happens in the grammaticality decision task

sentence viewed one word or phrase at a time

• participant makes sequence of judgments about grammatical acceptability of sentence

• but explicit grammatical decisions are not made during normal reading

What happens in the self-paced reading task

sentence viewed one word or phrase at a time

• participant indicate that they have read and understood each word or phrase

• self-paced judgments slow reading rate

• text presentation is not natural

What are the two theories of syntactic processing

• garden path theory

• referential theory / constraint-based theories

What is the garden path theory

accounts that disallow extra-syntactic influences

What is the referential theory / constraint-based theory

accounts that allow extra-syntactic influences

What are two parsing principles

• minimal attachment

  • requires that readers initially adopt the analysis of an ambiguity that has the simplest structure

• late closure

Extra-syntactic knowledge doesn’t influence what

initial parsing decisions

What did Trueswell et al., (1999) do

children and adults presented with different scenarios and asked to respond to spoken instructions

• children ages from 4-6 years

What did Trueswell et al., (1999) find

young children are unable to exploit the referential context under certain processing conditions

What did Hurewitz et al., (2000) find

children’s failure to use the referential context is specific to the comprehension process