Full Access
Multiple Constraints on Processing Ambiguous Sentences: Evidence From Adult L2 Learners
H. G. Ying,
Corresponding Author
H. G. Ying
The University of Arizona
concerning this article should be addressed to H. G. Ying, Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, The University of Arizona, 445 Modern Languages Building, Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA. Internet: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorH. G. Ying,
Corresponding Author
H. G. Ying
The University of Arizona
concerning this article should be addressed to H. G. Ying, Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, The University of Arizona, 445 Modern Languages Building, Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA. Internet: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorI thank Douglas Adamson and Adrienne Lehrer for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Janet Nicol and Renate Schulz for helpful discussion of some of the issues handled in this article, to Lydia White for kindly sending me her recent work, to Yili Li for statistical help, and to Adam Dudsic, Bonnie Fonseca-Greber, and Bill King for useful discussions of the experimental stimuli in Appendix A.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Chicago in March 1996.
Abstract
Forty-five adult second language learners of English participated in this study, which investigated syntactically ambiguous sentences in which a prepositional phrase is interpreted as either an NP (noun phrase) attachment or VP (verb phrase) attachment (e.g., The cop saw the spy with binoculars). One group of 23 students performed comprehension tasks, first by listening to the sentences produced with no distinction in intonation favoring the NP or the VP interpretation, then by listening to the sentences produced with an intonation that favored the NP interpretation. A second group of 22 students performed comprehension tasks, first by reading the sentences with no preceding context, then by reading them preceded by a referential context. The students also did 2 sentence-completion tasks, one manipulating “action verbs,” the other “psych and perception verbs,” to evaluate the verb-based lexical biasing effect. Statistical analyses of the results showed lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and contextual constraints on processing of ambiguous sentences.
References
- Abney, S. (1989). A computational model of human parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 129–144.
- Adjémian, C. (1983). The transferability of lexical properties. In S. M. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning (pp. 250–268). Rowley , MA : Newbury House.
- Altmann, G. (1986). Reference and the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity: The effect of context during human sentence processing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Scotland .
- Altmann, G. (1987). Modularity and interaction in sentence processing. In J. L. Garfield (Ed.), Modularity in knowledge representation and natural language understanding (pp. 249–257). Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Altmann, G., & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, 191–238.
-
Ard, J., &
Gass, S. M. (1987). Lexical constraints on syntactic acquisition.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 9, 233–252.
10.1017/S0272263100000498 Google Scholar
- Baker, C. L. (1979). Syntactic theory and the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry, 10, 533–581.
- Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the Competition Model. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3–73). Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Bialystok, E. (1990). The competence of processing: Classifying theories of second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 24, 635–648.
- Bialystok, E. (1994). Towards an explanation of second language acquisition. In G. Brown, K. Malmjær, A. Pollitt, & J. Williams (Eds.), Language and understanding (pp. 115–138). Oxford : Oxford University Press.
- Britt, M. A. (1994). The interaction of referential ambiguity and argument structure in the parsing of prepositional phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 251–283.
- Britt, M. A., Perfetti, C. A., Garrod, S., & Rayner, K. (1992). Parsing and discourse: Context effects and their limits. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 293–314.
- Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1983). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher's course. Rowley , MA : Newbury House.
- Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of consciousness experience in speaking and writing Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- Chomsky, N. (1964). The logical basis of linguistic theory. In H. G. Lunt (Ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass., August 27--31, 1962 (pp. 914–978) The Hague , Holland : Mouton.
- Clahsen, H. (1984). The acquisition of German word order. In R. Andersen (Ed.), Second languages (pp. 65–86). Rowley , MA : Newbury House.
-
Clahsen, H., &
Hong, U. (1995). Agreement and null subjects in German L2 development: New evidence from reaction-time experiments.
Second Language Research, 11, 57–87.
10.1177/026765839501100103 Google Scholar
-
Clahsen, H., &
Muysken, P. (1986). The availability of Universal Grammar to adult and child learners: A study of the acquisition of German word order.
Second Language Research, 2, 93–119.
10.1177/026765838600200201 Google Scholar
- Cooper, W. E., Paccia, J. M., & Lapointe, S. G. (1978). Hierarchical coding in speech timing. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 154–177.
- Dirksen, C. R. (1990). Learning styles of mainland Chinese students of English. IDEAL, 5, 29–38.
- DuBois, J., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Cumming, S., & Paolino, D. (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert (Eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research (pp. 45–87). Hillsdale , NJ : Erlbaum.
-
Eubank, L. (1993). Sentence matching and processing in L2 development.
Second Language Research, 9, 253–280.
10.1177/026765839300900303 Google Scholar
-
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology.
Cambridge
,
MA
: MIT Press.
10.7551/mitpress/4737.001.0001 Google Scholar
- Fodor, J. D. (1978). Parsing strategies and constraints on transformations. Linguistic Inquiry, 9, 427–473.
- Fodor, J. D., & Inoue, A. (1994). The diagnosis and cure of garden paths. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 407–434.
- Fodor, J. D., Ni, W., Crain, S., & Shankweiler, D. (1996). Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 25–57.
- Ford, M., Bresnan, J., & Kaplan, R. M. (1982). A competence-based theory of syntactic closure. In J. Bresnan (Ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 727–796). Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Frazier, L. (1979). On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies. Bloomington , IN : Indiana Linguistics Club.
- Frazier, L. (1987). Theories of sentence processing. In J. L. Garfield (Ed.), Modularity in knowledge-representation and natural-language understanding (pp. 291–307). Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Frazier, L., & De Villiers, J. (1990). Introduction. In L. Frazier and J. Villiers (Eds.), Language processing and language acquisition (pp. 1–11). Dordrecht , Netherlands : Kluwer.
- Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291–325.
- Frazier, L., & Rayner, R. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178–210.
- Freedman, S. E., & Forster, K. I. (1985). The psychological status of overgenerated sentences. Cognition, 19, 101–86.
- Garnham, A. (1994). Psychological processes and understanding. In G. Brown, K. Malmjær, A. Pollitt, & J. Williams (Eds.), Language and understanding (pp. 99–114). Oxford : Oxford University Press.
- Gass, S. M. (1987). The resolution of conflicts among competing systems: A bidirectional perspective. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 329–350.
-
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meaning.
Language Acquisition, 1, 3–55.
10.1207/s15327817la0101_2 Google Scholar
- Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument structure. Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Haegeman, L. (1994). Introduction to government and binding theory ( 2nd ed). Oxford : Blackwell.
- Hale, K., & Keyser, S. J. (1993). On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger (pp. 53–110). Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Harley, B., Howard, J., & Hart, D. (1995). Second language processing at different ages: Do younger learners pay more attention to prosodic cues to sentence structure Language Learning, 45, 43–71.
- Harrington, M. (1987). Processing transfer: Language-specific processing strategies as a source of interlanguage variation. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 351–377.
- Heilenman, L. K., & McDonald, J. L. (1993). Processing strategies in L2 learners of French: The role of transfer. Language Learning, 43, 507–557.
-
Juffs, A. (1996). Semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition.
Second Language Research, 12, 177–221.
10.1177/026765839601200203 Google Scholar
-
Juffs, A., &
Harrington, M. (1995). Parsing effects in second language sentence processing.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17, 483–516.
10.1017/S027226310001442X Google Scholar
- Kail, M. (1989). Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 77–117). Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Kasher, A. (1991). Pragmatics and the modularity of mind. In S. Davies (Ed.), Pragmatics: A reader (pp. 567–582). Oxford : Oxford University Press.
- Kilborn, K. (1989). Sentence processing in a second language: The timing of transfer. Language and Speech, 32, 1–23.
- Kilborn, K. (1994). Learning a language late: Second language acquisition in adults. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 917–944). San Diego , CA : Academic Press.
- Kilborn, K., & Cooreman, A. (1987). Sentence interpretation strategies in adult Dutch---English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 415–431.
- Kilborn, K., & Ito, T. (1989). Sentence processing strategies in adult bilinguals. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 257–291). Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Leech, G. N. (1971). Meaning and the English verb London : Longman.
- Levelt, W. J. M., Zwanenburg, W., & Ouweneel, G. R. E. (1970). Ambiguous surface structure and phonetic form in French. Foundations of Language, 6, 260–273.
- Liu, H., Bates, E., & Li, P. (1992). Sentence interpretation in bilingual speakers of English and Chinese. Applied Psycholinguistics, 13, 451–484.
- MacDonald, M. C. (1993). The interaction of lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 692–715.
- MacWhinney, B. (1987a). Applying the competition model to bilingualism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 315–327.
- MacWhinney, B. (1987b). The competition model. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 249–308). Hillsdale , NJ : Erlbaum.
-
MacWhinney, B. (1992). Competition and transfer in second language learning. In
R. J. Harris, (Ed.), Cognitive processing in bilinguals (pp.
371–390).
Amsterdam
: North-Holland.
10.1016/S0166-4115(08)61506-X Google Scholar
- McDonald, J. L., & Heilenman, L. K. (1991). Determinants of cue strength in adult first and second language speakers of French. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 313–348.
- Miao, X. (1981). Word order and semantic strategies in Chinese sentence comprehension. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 8, 23–33.
- Miller, G. A., & Chomsky, N. (1963). Finitary models of language users. In R. D. Luce, R. R. Bush, & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (pp. 419–492). New York : Wiley.
-
Myles, F. (1995). Interaction between linguistic theory and language processing in SLA.
Second Language Research, 11, 235–266.
10.1177/026765839501100303 Google Scholar
- Nicol, J. L. (1996a). Introduction. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 1–3.
- Nicol, J. L. (1996b). What can prosody tell a parser Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 179–192.
- Pesetsky, D. M. (1995). Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades. Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Pritchett, B. L. (1988). Garden path phenomena and the grammatical basis of language processing. Language, 64, 539–576.
- Pritchett, B. L. (1992). Grammatical competence and parsing performance Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London : Longman.
- Rayner, K., Carlson, M., & Frazier, L. (1983). The interaction of syntax and semantics during sentence processing: Eye movements in the analysis of semantically biased sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 22, 358–374.
- Rayner, K., & Frazier, L. (1987). Parsing temporarily ambiguous complements. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39A, 657–673.
- Reid, J. (1987). The learning style preferences of ESL students. TESOL Quarterly, 21, 87–111.
- Ritchie, W. C., & Bhatia, T. (1996). Second language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie and T. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 1–46). New York : Academic Press.
-
Sag, I. (1991). Linguistic theory and natural language processing. In
E. Klein &
F. Veltman (Eds.), Natural language and speech: Symposium proceedings, Brussels, November 26/27, 1991 (pp.
69–83).
Berlin
: Springer-Verlag.
10.1007/978-3-642-77189-7_5 Google Scholar
- Sasaki, Y. (1991). English and Japanese interlanguage comprehension strategies: An analysis based on the Competition Model. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 47–73.
-
Schachter, J., &
Yip, V. (1990). Grammaticality judgments: Why does anyone object to subject extraction
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 379–392.
10.1017/S0272263100009487 Google Scholar
- Sedivy, J. C., & Spivey-Knowlton, M. (1994). The use of structural, lexical, and pragmatic information in parsing attachment ambiguities. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp. 389–413). Hillsdale , NJ : Erlbaum.
- Smith, N. V., & Tsimpli, I. M. (1995). The mind of a savant: Language-learning and modularity Oxford : Blackwell.
- Sperber, D., Cara, F., & Girotto, V. (1995). Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition, 57, 31–95.
- Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition Oxford : Blackwell.
- Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints. Cognition, 55, 227–267.
- Steedman, M., & Altmann, G. (1989). Ambiguity in context: A reply. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 211–234.
- Tanenhaus, M. K., Boland, J., Garnsey, S. M., & Carlson, G. N. (1989). Lexical structure in parsing long-distance dependencies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 37–50.
- Vaid, J., & Pandit, R. (1991). Sentence interpretation in normal and aphasic Hindi speakers. Brain and Language, 41, 250–274.
- White, L. (1995). Psych verbs and the T/SM restriction: What do L2 learners know? In P. Lostinen (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1995 Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Conference (pp. 615–625). Toronto : University of Toronto.
- White, L., Brown, C., Bruhn-Garavito, J., Chen, D., Hirakawa, M., & Montrul, S. (in press). Psych verbs in second language acquisition. In E. Klein & G. Martohardjono (Eds.), Second language acquisition and generative grammar Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
- Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (1991). Pragmatics and modularity. In S. Davis (Ed.), Pragmatics: A reader (pp. 583–595). New York : Oxford University Press.
- Wulfeck, B. B., Juarez, L. A., Bates, E., & Kilborn, K. (1986). Sentence interpretation strategies in healthy and aphasic bilingual adults. In J. Vaid (Ed.), Language processing in bilinguals: Psycholinguistics and neurological perspectives (pp. 199–219). Hillsdale , NJ : Erlbaum.
