Do linguistic stimuli activate experiential colour traces related to the entities they refer to and, if so, under what circumstances?

The simulation view of language comprehension holds that lexical-semantic access prompts the re-enactment of sensorimotor experiences that regularly accompany word use. For the colour domain, this suggests that reading about a stop sign reactivates experiences involving the perception of the stop sign and hence experiences involving the colour red. However, it is still not clear what circumstances would limit reactivation of colour experiences during comprehension, if the activation takes place. To address this question, we varied in our study the conditions in which the target colour stimuli appeared. The experimental stimuli were individual words (Experiment (Exp.) 1, Exp. 7, 8) or sentences (Exp. 2-6) referring to objects with a typical colour of either green or red (e.g., cucumber or raspberry). Across experiments, we manipulated the presence of fillers (present or not), and whether fillers referred to objects with other colour (e.g., honey) or objects without any particular colour (e.g., car). The stimuli were presented along with two clickable "yes" and "no" buttons, one of which was red and the other green. Location and button colour varied from trial to trial. The tasks were lexical decision (Exp. 1, Exp. 7-8) and sensibility judgement (Exp. 2-6). We observed faster response times in the match vs mismatch condition in all word-based experiments, but only in those sentence-based experiments that did not have fillers. This suggests that comprehenders indeed reactivate colour experiences when processing linguistic stimuli referring to objects with a typical colour, but this activation seems to occur only under certain circumstances.

Interpreting Adjuncts: Processing English As-Clauses.

Four experiments probed the interpretation of sentence-final as-clauses (e.g., Close the book as a librarian would/would do) ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a "propositional" interpretation. Experiment 1, an interpretation study, found a predominance of manner interpretations for sentences containing would and would do as the elliptical predicate inside the as-clause, biased by which form participants were initially exposed to. In Experiment 2, we assumed that a comma may be present before the as-clause for both interpretations, but that when the contrast between a comma and no comma is called to the reader's attention it will favor the propositional interpretation. The expectation was confirmed. In Experiment 3 a would-sentence was preceded by a How question or by a What's with question: propositional interpretations were rare but more prevalent following the What's with question than the manner question. Experiment 4 added a What did question and tested both no-comma would (NoComma) sentences and comma would do (CommaDo) sentences. CommaDo sentences received more propositional interpretations than NoComma sentences, and were read faster following the What's with question than the How question, whereas the NoComma were read faster after the How question. All four studies showed manner interpretations prevail, though would do, a (contrastive) comma or a non-manner question increase the frequency of propositional interpretations. Two possibilities are considered for what underlies the manner preference: a general preference for an adjunct to be part of the event description in cases of ambiguity, or the availability of a pre-existing event-"slot" for manner. The reading time results favor the former possibility.

Negative clauses imply affirmative topics and affirmative antecedents.

We propose that negative clauses are generally interpreted as if the affirmative portion of the clause is under discussion, a likely topic. This predicts a preference for affirmative (topical) antecedents over negative antecedents of a following missing verb phrase (VP). Three experiments tested the predictions of this hypothesis in sentences containing negation in the first clause followed by an ambiguous as-clause as in Don't cross on red as a stupid person would and its counterpart with smart replacing stupid. In Experiment 1 sentences containing an undesirable attribute adjective such as stupid were rated as more natural, and read faster, than their desirable attribute counterparts (smart), with or without a comma preceding as. The second experiment indicated that the interpretation of the missing VP reflected the attribute adjective's desirability, with processing difficulty presumably reflecting reanalysis from the initial affirmative antecedent (cross on red) to include negation when the initial interpretation violated plausibility. A third experiment generalized the effect beyond sentences with an initial contracted don't.

A Note on the Voice Mismatch Asymmetry in Ellipsis.

Theories of ellipsis differ in the identity condition claimed to hold between an antecedent and an elided constituent. A syntactic identity condition leads to the prediction that syntactic mismatches between an antecedent and elided constituent should give rise to a penalty, and that penalty should be greater than in corresponding examples without ellipsis. Further, if syntactic mismatches are ungrammatical, violating the syntactic identity condition, then in effect they are speech errors and would be expected to be rated higher when a passive clause antecedes an active elided VP than vice versa because people misremember passives as actives more often the reverse. A written acceptability judgment study crossed the voice of the antecedent clause (active/passive), the voice of the ellipsis clause (active/passive) and ellipsis/non-ellipsis in the final clause. Results indicate a syntactic mismatch lowers acceptability in examples with elided VPs but not examples with overt VPs, as predicted by theories with a syntactic identity condition. Passive-active mismatches were rated better than active-passive ones, especially with ellipsis, as predicted by a speech error/repair approach to mismatches. This result eliminates any concern that the appearance of a voice asymmetry might only be due to some incompatibility between VP ellipsis and passive voice.

Evaluation of the epistemic state of the speaker/author.

Language users are sensitive to their language's grammatical requirements, the plausibility of the situation described and the information shared by speaker and listener. We propose that they are also sensitive to whether an author is likely to be in a state of knowledge that actually supports the assertion being made. Failure to be in such a state reduces the naturalness of the assertion. Consistent with this proposal, sentences with a disjoined noun phrase are judged to be less natural than their conjunctive counterparts, presumably because the author of a disjunctive sentence must know that an event took place but not know which of the two individuals was the agent. This unlikely state of knowledge reduces the naturalness of the sentence. The results of three experiments indicate that providing evidence that the speaker could be in an unlikely epistemic state reduces the disjunction penalty; a fourth extends the demonstration of the penalty from coordinated noun phrases to coordinated verb phrases. We also present one experiment that explores the possibility that disjunction penalty is due to the unexpectedness of a disjunction. These findings demonstrate that language users evaluate linguistic input in light of the epistemic state of its author.

Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content.

Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue' (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypothesis leads us to expect the semantic properties Potts established. We present experimental confirmation of two intuitive observations made by Potts: first that speech act adverbs should be acceptable as NAI content, supporting the speech act hypothesis; and second, that when two speech acts are expressed as successive sentences, the comprehender assumes they are related by some discourse coherence relation, whereas an NAI speech act need not bear a restrictive discourse coherence relation to its containing utterance, though overall sentences containing relevant content are rated more acceptable than those that do not. The speech act hypothesis accounts for these effects, and further accounts for why judgments of syntactic complexity or evaluations of whether or not a statement is true interact with the at-issue status of the material being judged or evaluated.

Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form.

A dialog consisting of an utterance by one speaker and another speaker's correction of its content seems intuitively to be made more acceptable when the new information is pitch accented or otherwise focused, and when the utterance and correction have the same syntactic form. Three acceptability judgment studies, one written and two auditory, investigated the interaction of focus (manipulated by sentence position and, in Experiments 2 and 3, pitch accent) and syntactic parallelism. Experiment 1 indicated that syntactic parallelism interacted with position of the new (contrastive) term: nonparallel forms were relatively acceptable when the new term appeared in object position, a position that commonly contains new information (a 'default focus' position). Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that presence of a pitch accent and placement in a default focus position had additive effects on acceptability. Surprisingly, spoken dialogs in which the new term appeared in object position were acceptable even when given information carried the most prominent pitch accent. The present studies, and earlier work, suggest that corrected information can be focused either by prosody or position even in spoken English-a language often thought to express focus through pitch accent, not syntactic position.

Accommodation to an Unlikely Episodic State.

Mini-discourses like (ia) seem slightly odd compared to their counterparts containing a conjunction (ib). (i) a. Speaker A: John or Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. b. Speaker A: John and Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. One possibility is that or in Speaker A's utterance in (ia) raises the potential Question Under Discussion (QUD) whether it was John or Bill who left and Speaker B's reply fails to address this QUD. A different possibility is that the epistemic state of the speaker of (ia) is somewhat unlikely or uneven: the speaker knows that someone left, and that it was John or Bill, but doesn't know which one. The results of four acceptability judgment studies confirmed that (ia) is less good or coherent than (ib) (Experiment 1), but not due to failure to address the QUD implicitly introduced by the disjunction because the penalty for disjunction persisted even in the presence of a different overt QUD (Experiment 2) and even when there was no reply to Speaker A (Experiment 3). The hypothesis that accommodating an unusual epistemic state might underlie the lower acceptability of disjunction was supported by the fact that the disjunction penalty is larger in past tense discourses than in future discourses, where partial knowledge of events is the norm (Experiment 4). The results of an eye tracking study revealed a penalty for disjunction relative to conjunction that was significantly smaller when a lead in (I wonder if it was…) explicitly introduced the disjunction. This interaction (connective X lead in) appeared in early measures on the disjunctive phrase itself, suggesting that the input is related to an inferred epistemic state of the speaker in a rapid and ongoing fashion.

Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: interpreting an uncertain input.

Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are "familiar", i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclusion of almost in A passerby rescued a child from almost being run over by a bus.), to a majority of unblended interpretations for doubled quantifier sentences (Many students often turn in their assignments late) to only a third undoubled implicit negation (I just like the way the president looks without his shirt off.) The repair or speech error reversal account offered here is contrasted with the noisy channel approach (Gibson et al., 2013) and the good enough processing approach (Ferreiera et al., 2002).

Two interpretive systems for natural language?

It is proposed that humans have available to them two systems for interpreting natural language. One system is familiar from formal semantics. It is a type based system that pairs a syntactic form with its interpretation using grammatical rules of composition. This system delivers both plausible and implausible meanings. The other proposed system is one that uses the grammar together with knowledge of how the human production system works. It is token based and only delivers plausible meanings, including meanings based on a repaired input when the input might have been produced as a speech error.

Do Null Subjects (mis-)Trigger Pro-drop Grammars?

Native speakers of English regularly hear sentences without overt subjects. Nevertheless, they maintain a [−pro] grammar that requires sentences to have an overt subject. It is proposed that listeners of English recognize that speakers reduce predictable material and thus attribute null subjects to this process, rather than changing their grammars to a [−pro] setting. Mack et al. (J Memory Lang 67(1):211-223, 2012) showed that sentences with noise covering the subject are analyzed as having null subjects more often with a first person pronoun and with a present tense--properties correlated with more predictable referents--compared to a third person pronoun and past tense. However, those results might in principle have been due to reporting null subjects for verbs that often occur with null subjects. An experiment is reported here in which comparable results are found for sentences containing nonsense verbs. Participants preferred a null subject more often for first person present tense sentences than for third person past tense sentences. The results are as expected if participants are responding to predictability, the likelihood of reduction, rather than to lexical statistics. The results are argued to be important in removing a class of mis-triggering examples from the language acquisition problem.

Pushed aside: Parentheticals, Memory and Processing.

In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' content (Potts, 2005) are processed semi-independently. In a written rating study comparing restrictive relative clauses and parentheticals in interrogatives and declaratives, we observe a significantly larger length penalty for restrictive relative clauses than for parentheticals. This difference cannot be attributed to differences in how listeners allocate attention across a sentence: a second study confirms that readers are equally sensitive to agreement violations in at-issue and not-at-issue content. A third rating experiment showed that the results do not depend on the restrictive relative clause intervening on the subject-verb dependency. A final experiment showed that the observed effects obtain with definite determiners and demonstratives alike. Taken jointly the results suggest that the parenthetical structures are processed independently of their embedding utterance, which in turn suggests that syntactic memory may be more differentiated than is typically assumed.

Standing alone with prosodic help.

Two partially independent issues are addressed in two auditory rating studies: under what circumstances is a sub-string of a sentence identified as a stand-alone sentence, and under what circumstances do globally ill-formed but 'locally coherent' analyses (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson., 2004) emerge? A new type of locally coherent structure is established in Experiment 1, where a that-less complement clause is at least temporarily analyzed as a stand-alone sentence when it corresponds to a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, reduced relative clause structures like those in Tabor et al. were investigated. As in Experiment 1, the root sentence (mis-)analyses emerged most frequently when the locally coherent clause corresponded to a prosodic phrase. However, a substantial number of locally coherent analyses emerged even without prosodic help, especially in examples with for-datives (which do not grammatically permit a reduced relative clause structure for some speakers). Overall, the results suggest that prosodic grouping of constituents encourages analysis of a sub-string as a root sentence, and raise the question of whether all local coherence structures involve analysis of an utterance-final sub-string as a root sentence.

Partition if You Must: Evidence for a No Extra Times Principle.

Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which subsets of the kids do different things, or it might involve quantifying over distinct scenarios, in which all of the kids do one thing or all of them do the other. In the present work and related earlier work (Harris et al., 2013), we pursue the No Extra Times principle that favors interpretations where a phrase is construed as describing a single event taking place during a given time period. In two written interpretation studies, we found that participants more often interpret indeterminate sentences with disjunctive predicates by partitioning the set of individuals rather than partitioning the predicate to denote distinct scenarios or times. We conclude by offering some speculations about why partitioning the eventuality denoted by the verb phrase into multiple times is more costly than partitioning the entities denoted by its subject noun phrase into multiple sets.

Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects.

Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, e.g., The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times (Majewski 2006, in preparation), discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favors the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb mostly (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing.

Discourse integration guided by the 'question under discussion'.

What makes a discourse coherent? One potential factor has been discussed in the linguistic literature in terms of a Question under Discussion (QUD). This approach claims that discourse proceeds by continually raising explicit or implicit questions, viewed as sets of alternatives, or competing descriptions of the world. If the interlocutor accepts the question, it becomes the QUD, a narrowed set of alternatives to be addressed (Roberts, in press). Three eye movement recording studies are reported that investigated the effect of a preceding explicit QUD (Experiment 1) or implicit QUD (Experiments 2 and 3) on the processing of following text. Experiment 1 revealed an effect of whether the question queried alternative propositions or alternative entities. Reading times in the answer were faster when the answer it provided was of the same semantic type as was queried. Experiment 2 tested QUDs implied by the alternative description of reality introduced by a non-actuality implicature trigger such as should X or want to X. The results, when combined with the results of Experiment 3 (which ruled out a possible alternative interpretation) showed disrupted reading of a following verb phrase that failed to resolve the implicit QUD (Did the discourse participant actually X?), compared to reading the same material in the absence of a clear QUD. The findings support an online role for QUDs in guiding readers' structuring and interpretation of discourse.

Interpreting conjoined noun phrases and conjoined clauses: collective versus distributive preferences.

Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favours a single event (collective) interpretation, while introducing them in separate clauses favours a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgements were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events versus a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects' referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately-in distinct clauses as "split" antecedents.

The Role of Non-Actuality Implicatures in Processing Elided Constituents.

When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example (This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't. vs This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.) We model this effect in terms of Non-Actuality Implicatures (NAIs) conveyed by non-epistemic modals like should and other words such as want to and be eager to that imply non-actuality. We report three studies. A rating and interpretation study showed that such implicatures are drawn and that they improve the acceptability of mismatch ellipsis examples. An interpretation study showed that adding a NAI trigger to ambiguous examples increases the likelihood of choosing an antecedent from the NAI clause. An eye movement study shows that a NAI trigger also speeds online reading of the ellipsis clause. By introducing alternatives (the desired state of affairs vs. the actual state of affairs), the NAI trigger introduces a potential Question Under Discussion (QUD). Processing an ellipsis clause is easier, the processor is more confident of its analysis, when the ellipsis clause comments on the QUD.