Processing and Producing Head-final Structures

411 Pages·2011·5.458 MB·English

by  Leticia Pablos (auth.), Hiroko Yamashita, Yuki Hirose, Jerome L. Packard (eds.)

PROCESSINGANDPRODUCINGHEAD-FINALSTRUCTURES
STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
VOLUME38
ManagingEditors
LynFrazier,Dept.ofLinguistics,UniversityofMassachusettsatAmherst
ThomasRoeper,Dept.ofLinguistics,UniversityofMassachusettsatAmherst
KennethWexler,Dept.ofBrainandCognitiveScience,MIT,Cambridge,Mass.
EditorialBoard
RobertBerwick,ArtificialIntelligenceLaboratory,MIT,Cambridge,Mass.
MatthewCrocker,SaarlandUniversity,Germany
JanetDeanFodor,CityUniversityofNewYork,NewYork
AngelaFriederici,MaxPlanckInstituteofHumanCognitiveandBrainSciences,Germany
MerrillGarrett,UniversityofArizona,Tucson
LilaGleitman,SchoolofEducation,UniversityofPennsylvania
ChrisKennedy,NorthwesternUniversity,Illinois
ManfredKrifka,HumboldtUniversity,Berlin,Germany
HowardLasnik,UniversityofConnecticutatStorrs
YukioOtsu,KeioUniversity,Tokyo
AndrewRadford,UniversityofEssex,U.K.
Forfurthervolumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/6555
PROCESSING AND
PRODUCING HEAD-FINAL
STRUCTURES
Editedby
HIROKOYAMASHITA
RochesterInstituteofTechnology,Rochester,NY,USA
YUKIHIROSE
UniversityofTokyo,Tokyo,Japan
and
JEROMEL.PACKARD
UniversityofIllinoisatUrbana-Champaign,IL,USA
1 3
Editors
HirokoYamashita YukiHirose
DepartmentofModernLanguages DepartmentofLanguage
andCultures andInformationSciences
RochesterInstituteofTechnology TheUniversityofTokyo
92LombMemorialDrive 3-8-1Komaba,Meguro-ku
Rochester,NY,14623USA Tokyo,153-8902 Japan
[email protected] [email protected]
JeromeL.Packard
DepartmentofEastLanguages
andCultures
UniversityofIllinoisat
Urbana-Champaign
2090AForeignLanguageBuilding
707S.Mathews
Urbana,IL,61801USA
[email protected]
ISSN1873-0043
ISBN978-90-481-9212-0 e-ISBN978-90-481-9213-7
DOI10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7
SpringerDordrechtHeidelbergLondonNewYork
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2010937565
#SpringerScienceþBusinessMediaB.V.2011
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Acknowledgements
Wewouldliketothankallcontributorstothecurrentvolume.Thisbookisthe
fruitoftheInternationalConferenceonProcessingHead-finalStructuresheld
at the Rochester Institute of Technology in September, 2007. Building on the
seminalSymposiumofJapaneseSentenceProcessingheldatDukeUniversity
in 1991 and the Workshop of Japanese Sentence Processing held at the Ohio
State University in 1999, the International Conference on Processing Head-
final Structures was the first of its kind, comprehensively dealing with the
processingandproductionofhead-finalstructuresinmultiplelanguages.
The conference was made possible by grants from the National Science
Foundation (BCS-0642367), Center for Language Sciences at University of
Rochester, University of Richmond, 21st Century Center of Excellence
Program at the University of Tokyo, Center for Evolutionary Cognitive
Science at the University of Tokyo, College of Liberal Arts at Rochester
Institute of Technology and the Department of Modern Languages and
Cultures at Rochester Institute of Technology. The editing of this book was
funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0642367), and the Office
of the Provost for Research at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Any
opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
theNationalScienceFoundationorotherfundingsources.
v
Head-Direction and its Effect on Comprehension
and Production
‘‘Whatabouthead-finalstructures?’’Thisquestion,whichbegantoberaisedin
the late 1980s, has expanded the depth and breadth of human sentence
processingresearch.
Earlier work on sentence comprehension in the 1970s revealed the
remarkable efficiency of the human language parser. In daily life, listeners
and readers receive linguistic input in linear fashion over the time course of a
sentence. As information comes in, we encounter many potential lexical and
syntactic ambiguities that cause a sentence fragment to have more than one
possibleinterpretation.
InEnglish,forexample,afragmentsuchasThelawyerinvestigated...could
beginasimplexsentencewithadirectobject,suchasThelawyerinvestigatedthe
case,oritmaybethebeginningofasentencewitharelativeclause,Thelawyer
investigatedfortaxevasionwasinterviewedonthemorningshow.Likewise,the
multiple selectional restriction options on the verb knew lead the sentence
fragmentJohn knew thegirl... tothe two possiblecompletions John knew the
girl or John knew the girl was from New York. Such possibilities raise the
question of how humans can so effortlessly process language in spite of such
greatpotentialforambiguity.
As a means of navigating such ambiguity, researchers have proposed
that the parser tends to follow certain principles. For example, the parser
may hypothesize the simplest possible structure consistent with the input
data – an approach known as the Minimal Attachment Principle (Frazier,
1978) – or it may attempt to associate adjacent words as clause-mates,
referred to as the Local Association Principle (Frazier & Fodor, 1978).
Researchers have also found that information in the input stream tends
to be exploited early on for comprehension purposes. Of particular
prominence are phrasal heads – especially verbs – which provide critical
information about syntactic constituency (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, &
Garnsey, 1990; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993). Verbs do the
important work of specifying selectional restrictions and assigning
thematic roles to complements. In a head-initial language like English,
the verb appears early, not only marking the onset of the VP but also
providing selectional restriction and probabilistic information on the type
vii
viii Head-DirectionanditsEffectonComprehensionandProduction
of complements the verb may take. For example, Garnsey, Perlmutter,
Meyers, and Lotocky (1997) found that English readers utilize the
statistical preference of the verb, expecting (1b) as the likely continuation
when they read the verb argued but expecting (2a) when they read
discovered.
(1) Thedivorcelawyerarguedtheissue...
a.Thedivorcelawyerarguedtheissue.
b.Thedivorcelawyerarguedtheissuewasirrelevanttothecase.
(2) Thescubadiverdiscoveredthewreck...
a.Thescubadiverdiscoveredthewreck.
b.Thescubadiverdiscoveredthewreckwascausedbyacollision.
This example, in which the parser exploits information contained in the
information-laden verb head, involves the notion of head-driven parsing
(Abney, 1989; Pritchett, 1988, 1992). Head-driven parsing posits that the
parsing of an incoming phrase critically depends on the appearance of the
phrasal head, because the phrasal head provides key information about
syntactic constituency. According to this theory, the parser waits until the
phrasal head appears in the input stream before it assigns a structural
interpretationtothephrase.
As the examples in (1) and (2) demonstrate, information contained in the
verb head is especially important for head-initial languages like English,
making the head-driven parsing theory a natural one for head-initial
structures. But it also raises an obvious question: if sentence processing is
head-driven, then how are structures processed when the head follows a
constituent rather than occurring in phrase-initial position (e.g., Inoue, 1991;
Inoue&Fodor,1995;Mazuka&Lust,1990;Yamashita,1994)?
Languages such as Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Basque are
predominantly head-final, with the information contained in the head
naturally not available to the parser until the head appears in the input
stream. In addition to the early unavailability of head information in
those languages, there is also often no clear marking of the beginning of
embedded clauses–so-called ‘‘left-edge marking.’’ In such cases the parser
has less information about, for example, the degree of embedding within
a sentence, until all phrase-final heads are processed. Often these
languages have flexible word-order and phonologically null pronouns,
both contributing more ambiguity to the parse (e.g., Inoue, 1991;
Mazuka & Lust, 1990).
To illustrate, the two arguments in Japanese marked by nominative and
dativecasemarkersin(3)maybethebeginningofasimplexclauseasin(4),part
ofarelativeclauseasin(5),orwithaphonologicallynullpronoun(indicated
Head-DirectionanditsEffectonComprehensionandProduction ix
here as e) they may be two arguments that belong respectively to matrix and
subordinateclauses,asin(6).
(3) John-ga Mary-ni...
John-NOMMary-DAT
(4) John-ga Mary-ni pen-o ageta.
John-NOMMary-DATpen-ACCgave.
‘JohngaveMaryanapple.’
(5) [[John-ga Mary-ni ageta]pen]-ga kowareta.
John-NOMMary-DATgave pen-NOMbroke
‘ThepenthatJohngavetoMarybroke.’
(6) John-ga [eMary-ni pen-o ageta]-to itta.
John-NOM Mary-DATpen-ACCgave-comp said
‘JohnsaidthathegaveapentoMary.’
Thequestionofinterestis:atwhatpointintheprocessingofsentenceslike
(4)–(6) does the parser commit itself to a simplex clause analysis or posit
embedded structures? With information from the syntactic head available
only at clause-final position, the possibility suggested by head-driven parsing
is that the parser waitsto posit syntactic structure until the information from
theheadbecomesavailable.
Asanalternativetohead-drivenparsing,itwasproposedthattheparseris
more opportunistic, using all available information to build structure even
before the information from the head is available. This fully incremental
parsing approach (e.g., Crocker, 1994; Gorrell, 1995; Lombardo & Sturt,
2002; Stabler, 1994; Sturt & Crocker, 1996) entails that every incoming word
incrementally contributes its information to the structure of the phrase under
construction.Themultiplicityofpossibleanalysesinherentinsuchanapproach
entails that the parser frequently revises its initial hypotheses, potentially
resulting in increased processing difficulty. In 1995 Inoue and Fodor
introduced ‘‘Information–paced Processing,’’ in which the ease of revising
incorrect initial parses depends upon the reliability of the existing analysis.
Thus even though the delayed availability of information from the head in
head-final languages might lead to more parsing possibilities than in head-
initial languages, it was suggested that head-final languages may have more
tolerance for adjusting initial analyses. Those questions involving head-final
parsing led to a flurry of processing studies in languages with head-final
structures (e.g., Berwick & Fong, 1995; Konieczny, Hemforth, Scheepers, &
Strube, 1997; Miyamoto, 1999; Nakayama, 1995; Sakamoto, 1991; Vasishth,
2003;Yamashita,1994).
As the field continued to develop based on the syntax-based approach
followed in the 1970s, sentence processing researchers examined factors such
x Head-DirectionanditsEffectonComprehensionandProduction
asdiscourse(Altmann&Steedman,1988;Crain&Steedman,1985),stochastic
information(Merlo&Stevenson,2002)andprosody(Beach,1991;Kjelgaard&
Speer, 1999). New experimental procedures were devised, with eye-tracking,
event-relatedpotential(ERP),brainimagingandmostrecentlycorpusstudies,
coming onto the scene and used alongside the reliable standard self-paced
moving-window technique. Head-final sentence processing research
developed concomitantly, with some studies focusing on areas common to
head-initial and head-final structures. They include the studies on the
immediate utilization of case and other morphological markings or verb
information for predicting (a) forthcoming structure(s) (e.g., Kamide &
Mitchell,1999;Yamashita,1995;Yoshida,2006),theroleofthematicrolesat
the different stages of processing (Hirose, 2002; Hirose & Inoue, 1998),
individual differences in comprehension (Jincho, Namiki, & Mazuka, 2008)
and preference on ambiguous relative clause interpretation (relative clause
attachment) (e.g., Gibson, Perlmutter, Gonzalez, & Hickok, 1996; Hemforth,
Konieczny, Scheepers, & Strube, 1998; Miyamoto, Gibson, Pearlmutter,
Aikawa, & Miyagawa, 1999). Some researchers used head-final structures to
posequestionsnoteasilyaddressedinhead-initiallanguages,suchasdetecting
or processing relative clauses, where the head is at the final position of
the construction (e.g., Hsiao & Gibson, 2003; Miyamoto & Nakamura, 2003;
Ueno&Garnsey,2007).Andsomeinvestigatedtheprocessingthatisuniqueto
languageswithhead-finalstructuressuchaseffectsofscramblinginprocessing
(Kim, 1999; Mazuka, Itoh, & Kondo, 2002; Miyamoto & Takahashi, 2002;
Yamashita, 1997). These approaches were critical in advancing the field of
psycholinguistics, as they drew commonalities among different types of
languagesorhighlightedtheeffectsoflanguage-specificlinguisticphenomena
onhumanlanguageprocessing.
Studies on head-final languages are no longer uncommon in the field of
sentence processing but at the same time the increasing number of topics and
variety of examined structures signaled the need for a comprehensive
examination of head-final sentence processing research. The International
Conference on Processing Head-final Structures held at the Rochester
InstituteofTechnologyinSeptember2007servedthatpurpose.
Our conference was intended to bring together cutting-edge research on
head-final sentence processing and production, to generate comparisons with
head-initiallanguagessuchasEnglishandtohaveahandinsettingtheresearch
agenda over the next several years. The chapters in this book find their
provenanceinthepresentationsatthatconference,offeringexperimentaldata
andtheoreticaldiscussionsfromhead-finalstructuresinlanguagesasdiverseas
Basque,Chinese,Hindi,Japanese,KoreanandGerman.
ThechaptersinPartIfocusonthecomprehensionofhead-finalstructures
and its incremental nature. Although the details remain a matter of debate,
resultsonhead-finalprocessingsuggestthattheparserisatworkincrementally
employing all available sources of information – such as case, agreement, or
thematicroles–wellbeforetheheadisencountered.Evidenceforincremental