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Distinctions related to person and animacy have long been known to impact both the grammar and incremental processing in a way that can be described through "prominence" scales. We put the generalizability of these scales to the test by examining the processing effects of a typologically uncommon distinction known as obviation, which is found in Ojibwe, an Indigenous language of North America. Obviation contrasts the single most discourse-salient animate third person (proximate) with other non-salient third persons (obviative). Using a visual world paradigm, we show that obviation influences parsing and interpretation commitments under incremental ambiguity: Proximate nouns are assumed to be the agent of an action, while obviative nouns do not lead to strong incremental commitments. This result parallels previous findings in other languages with distinctions related to animacy and person, supporting a theory where the effect of prominence information in processing is the result of a common set of constraints derived from the alignment of scales related to person, syntactic position, and thematic role.

International audience; Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences that involved a filler–gap dependency (indirect questions in Italian and free relatives in French) were dispreferred compared to sentences involving the same lexical material but no filler–gap dependency (declarative complement clauses in both languages). Crucially, the filler–gap dependency was not dispreferred when there was no available competitor. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these results for syntactic theory, in particular for the questionable status of Merge over Move as a grammatical principle.

In English, when two nouns in a disjunctive subject differ in number (e.g., the dogs or the cat), the verb tends to agree with the number of the nearer noun. This is exceptional, as a noun's linear proximity to the verb does not generally play a role in agreement. In the present study, we investigate a further puzzle about agreement with disjunction, namely, the existence of a pattern in which two singular disjuncts trigger plural agreement (e.g., The lawyer or the accountant are…). Two eyetracking studies in English show that plural agreement with a disjunction of singulars does not reliably disrupt readers' eye movements, in contrast to the immediate disruptive effect of other agreement violations. Three off-line rating studies in English show that plural agreement results in only a small decrement in acceptability, compared to other agreement violations, and that in some structural configurations there is no decrement at all. On the whole, the data do not support the hypothesis that plural agreement is licensed only when or has an inclusive reading; even when it has an exclusive reading, there is only a small penalty for plural agreement. Finally, we explored this issue in Italian, which has a richer system of inflectional morphology. Italian speakers showed a plural preference in a completion experiment, and singular and plural agreement did not differ in acceptability in a rating experiment. We conclude that agreement with disjunction is a grammatical lacuna or gap, in the sense that speakers' grammar simply does not prescribe a verb number following a disjunctive subject.

Previous research ( Mirault, Snell, & Grainger, 2018 ) has demonstrated that subjects sometimes incorrectly judge an ungrammatical sentence as grammatical when it is created by the transposition of two words in a grammatical sentence (e.g., The white was cat big). Here we present two eye-tracking experiments designed to assess the prevalence of this phenomenon in a more natural reading task, and to explore theoretical explanations. Readers failed to notice transpositions at about the same rate as in Mirault et al. (2018) . Failure to notice the transposition was more common when both words were short, and when readers' eyes skipped, rather than directly fixated, one of the two words. The status of the transposed words as open- or closed-class did not have a reliable effect. The transposed words caused disruption in the eye movement record only on trials when participants ultimately judged the sentence to be ungrammatical, not when they judged the sentence to be grammatical. We argue that the results are not entirely consistent with the account offered by Mirault et al. (2018) , which attributes failure to notice transpositions to parallel processing of adjacent words, or with a late, post-perceptual rational inference account ( Gibson, Bergen, & Piantadosi, 2013 ). We propose that word recognition is serial, but post-lexical integration of each word into its context may not be perfectly incremental.

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is entirely eliminated if additional material intervenes between the object gap and the matrix verb. An explanation in terms of spillover processing is ruled out, suggesting that it is the gap-matrix verb sequence that is itself responsible for the difficulty. We consider two accounts of this difficulty, one emphasizing the potential difficulty of rapidly switching between the sentential subject's thematic or syntactic role in the embedded clause and its role in the matrix clause, and one emphasizing the potential difficulty of performing two demanding memory retrievals in rapid succession. The present experiments also closely replicate the previous findings from eyetracking that the noun phrase and the verb within an object relative are both loci of processing difficulty, but that the former induces substantially greater difficulty.

The conditions under which speakers make syntactic errors, and the manner in which listeners respond to them, provide insight into how complex computational problems related to the rules of language are solved. One of the important syntactic rules of English is that a subject and its corresponding verb must agree in number. However, the presence of a number-bearing element between the subject and verb results in frequent production errors and has also been shown to complicate comprehension. When asked to press a button in response to anomalies in several narrated short stories, participants in the current study were better able to detect subject–verb agreement violations when there were no intervening words. In a separate event-related potential (ERP) experiment in which participants listened to the same stories for comprehension, simple subject–verb agreement violations elicited the predicted anterior negativity and later posterior positivity (P600). In contrast, when a singular noun phrase appeared betw...

In 3 experiments, the author examined how readers' eye movements are influenced by joint manipulations of a word's frequency and the syntactic fit of the word in its context. In the critical conditions of the first 2 experiments, a high- or low-frequency verb was used to disambiguate a garden-path sentence, while in the last experiment, a high- or low-frequency verb constituted a phrase structure violation. The frequency manipulation always influenced the early eye movement measures of first-fixation duration and gaze duration. The context manipulation had a delayed effect in Experiment 1, influencing only the probability of a regressive eye movement from later in the sentence. However, the context manipulation influenced the same early eye movement measures as the frequency effect in Experiments 2 and 3, though there was no statistical interaction between the effects of these variables. The context manipulation also influenced the probability of a regressive eye movement from the verb, though the frequency manipulation did not. These results are shown to confirm predictions emerging from the serial, staged architecture for lexical and integrative processing of the E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). It is argued, more generally, that the results provide an important constraint on how the relationship between visual word recognition and syntactic attachment is treated in processing models.

A word's predictability in context has a well-established effect on fixation durations in reading. To investigate how this effect is manifested in distributional terms, an experiment was carried out in which subjects read each of 50 target words twice, once in a high-predictability context and once in a low-predictability context. The ex-Gaussian distribution was fit to each subject's first-fixation durations and single-fixation durations. For both measures, the μ parameter increased when a word was unpredictable, while the τ parameter was not significantly affected, indicating that a predictability manipulation shifts the distribution of fixation durations but does not affect the degree of skew. Vincentile plots showed that the mean ex-Gaussian parameters described the typical distribution shapes extremely well. These results suggest that the predictability and frequency effects are functionally distinct, since a frequency manipulation has been shown to influence both μ and τ. The results may also be seen as consistent with the finding from single-word recognition paradigms that semantic priming affects only μ.

Speakers are known to make subject–verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., ∗The key to the cabinets are on the table) and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., ∗The cabinets that the key open are on the second floor). Using a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm, Staub (2009) found that correct agreement decisions were also slowed in both cases. The present article reports a new experiment designed to explore whether these two RT effects are qualitatively similar or different. Fitting of the ex-Gaussian distribution ( Ratcliff, 1979 ) to individual subjects’ RT data, in each condition, demonstrated that the effect of an intervening number attractor on correct RT is due to both a shifting of the distribution to the right and to increased skewing, while the effect of a non-intervening attractor is almost entirely a skewing effect. A non-parametric vincentizing procedure supported these conclusions. These findings are taken to support the view that these two types of number attraction involve distinct processing mechanisms.

Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive to subtle relationships between sound and syntactic function and that they make rapid use of this information in comprehension. The present article reports attempts to replicate this result using both eyetracking during normal reading (Experiment 1) and word-by-word self-paced reading (Experiment 2). No hint of a phonological typicality effect emerged on any reading-time measure in Experiment 1, nor did Experiment 2 replicate Farmer et al.'s finding from self-paced reading. Indeed, the differences between condition means were not consistently in the predicted direction, as phonologically atypical verbs were read more quickly than phonologically typical verbs, on most measures. Implications for research on visual word recognition are discussed.

A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought to be associated with processing syntactically ambiguous material. We argue that this prediction is not confirmed by the data, and we discuss recent claims that the models in question do not actually make this prediction. We also emphasize the contrast with lexical ambiguity, where there is clearly a processing cost associated with competition between alternate meanings. Finally, we review a different kind of recent evidence suggesting that two syntactic analyses may indeed coexist under specific circumstances.

Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical conditions were designed to induce readers to construct the ultimately correct analysis just prior to being garden-pathed by the incorrect analysis. In both experiments, the earliest measures of the garden path effect were not modulated by this manipulation. However, there was significantly less regressive re-reading of the sentence in those conditions in which the correct analysis was likely to have been constructed, then abandoned, at an earlier point. These results suggest that a syntactic analysis that is abandoned in the course of processing a sentence is not lost altogether, and can be re-activated or retrieved from memory. Implications for models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

Several previous studies (Adams, Clifton, & Mitchell, 1998; Mitchell, 1987; van Gompel & Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eyetracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 strongly replicated the finding (van Gompel & Pickering, 2001) that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading, and found that this difficulty occurs even with a class of intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis, but is instead due to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Exploring a different construction, Experiment 3 replicated the finding (Pickering & Traxler, 2003; Traxler & Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase “filler” is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the three experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions.

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input.

In their reply to our article (Staub, Grant, Clifton, & Rayner, 2009), Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen (2011) argue that prediction is important in sentence processing, that the phonological typicality of nouns and verbs can affect judgments about sentences, and, most centrally, that the phonological typicality of a word with a predicted part of speech has an immediate and substantial effect on on-line reading. The present debate is entirely about the last of these claims.1 The initial report by Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) suggested that phonological atypicality slowed self-paced reading of nouns and verbs by nearly 50 ms. Because we considered an effect of this magnitude to be surprising, we (Staub et al., 2009) conducted and reported two experiments, one using eyetracking and one using self-paced reading, attempting to replicate the effect that Farmer et al. (2006) reported. In neither study did any hint of this effect appear. Farmer et al. (2011) now argue that we did not obtain a phonological typicality effect in our experiments because we intermixed the critical noun and verb stimuli, in contrast to Farmer et al. (2006), who conducted separate experiments with nouns and with verbs. In our intermixed design, they suggest, “it is likely that subjects implicitly learn to recognize the structure shared between the N and V items….and that when such a word order is used, the main verb can be followed by either an N- or V- structure.” They then present data from a new self-paced reading experiment with an intermixed design. As in our experiments, they do not find evidence of a phonological typicality effect overall. However, they argue that there is evidence of an effect at the very beginning of the experiment, which decreases over time, consistent with their proposal that structure-based expectations for a noun or verb diminish over time when the two sentence types are intermixed. We have two objections to this account. The first is simply that there is very little support for Farmer et al.’ s main empirical claim, i.e., that there is a phonological typicality effect at the beginning of their experiment with an intermixed design. The second is that, even if the data were stronger, their hypothesis about the effect of an intermixed experimental design is puzzling. We take these points in order.

This guide accompanies the following article: Charles Clifton Jr and Adrian Staub, ‘Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution’, Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 234–250, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00055.x Introduction Two metaphors have dominated cognitive psychology throughout its history: ‘activation’ and ‘computation’. Activation (itself metaphorically based on neural firing rate) assumes that representations (mental symbols or patterns of non-symbolic ‘nodes’) exist at varying degrees of activation, and high activation of a representation amounts to something like perception or recall. Computation assumes that representations are instead constructed from more elementary components, and that a representation does not exist prior to its construction. We examine the differential implications of these metaphors in the domain of sentence comprehension. Most theories that claim the representation of a sentence is something that is activated by input which proposes that multiple representations are at least temporarily activated, and in order for one representation to be selected, it must de-activate the others in a time-consuming process of competition. Theories that claim that the representation of a sentence is constructed, in contrast, have to posit rules for how the input guides construction, but by and large, these theories do not claim that alternative possible representations compete with each other. We review evidence indicating that time-consuming competition does exist in the process of recognizing individual words, but propose that nearly all existing evidence denies competition in the case of sentence comprehension. Annotated References Clifton, C., Jr., A. Staub, and K. Rayner. 2007. Eye movements in reading words and sentences. Eye movement research: insights into mind and brain, ed. by. R. van Gompel, M. Fisher, W. Murray and R. L. Hill, 341–71. New York: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-008044980-7/50017-3 This chapter contains an extensive review of experiments on eye movements made while reading sentences, examining a number of questions in addition to the one addressed here, namely, whether the eyes slow down while reading a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Duffy, S., G. Kambe, and K. Rayner. 2001. The effect of prior disambiguating context on the comprehension of ambiguous words: evidence from eye movements. On the consequences of meaning selection: perspectives on resolving lexical ambiguity, ed. by D. S. Gorfein, 27–43. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi: 10.1037/10459-002 An accessible review of eyetracking research supporting the existence of competition between alternative meanings of ambiguous words. Elman, J. L., M. Hare, and K. McRae. 2004. Cues, constraints, and competition in sentence processing. Beyond nature-nurture: essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates, ed. by M. Tomasello and D. Slobin, 111–138. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This chapter presents an implemented constraint-based model of sentence comprehension, making a clear prediction that time-consuming competition exists during the reading and the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity, and presenting data that indicate that reading is slowed only during the resolution. Frazier, L. 1987. Sentence processing: a tutorial review. Attention and performance XII, ed. by M. Coltheart, 559–86. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This is probably the most-cited presentation of the ‘garden-path’ model discussed in the paper. It predates the full development of constraint-based competition models. Frazier, L. (1995). Constraint satisfaction as a theory of sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24.437–68. doi: 10.1007/BF02143161 This article presents a variety of criticisms of constraint-based models of sentence processing in addition to the current claim that competition in the region of a syntactic ambiguity is not observed. Green, M. J., and D. C. Mitchell. 2006. Absence of real evidence against competition during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 55.1–17. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2006.03.003 Green and Mitchell present an interesting claim that local ambiguity does not necessarily result in competition. The claim seems to be correct, but we argue that it does not plausibly apply to most instances of sentence comprehension. MacDonald, M. C., N. J. Pearlmutter, and M. S. Seidenberg. 1994. The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 101.676–703. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.676 This is an important article, advocating the claim that sentence comprehension is much the same as word recognition, and that both are characterized by competition between multiple possible representations. van Gompel, R. P. G., M. J. Pickering, and M. J. Traxler, M. 2001. Reanalysis in sentence processing: evidence against current constraint-based and two-stage models. Journal of Memory and Language 45.225–258. doi: 10.1006/jmla.2001.2773 One of a series of studies indicating that syntactic ambiguity can speed reading rather than slowing it. Focus Questions 1. Assuming the authors’ perspective that there is parallel activation of, and competition between, multiple meanings of a word, but not between multiple syntactic analyses, why might this be the case? Are there considerations of efficiency or resource constraints that would give rise to this difference? 2. In what other areas of cognition is there evidence of competition for selection between activated representations, or between response options? 3. The authors suggest that the argument by Green and Mitchell (2006) is implausible because it assumes pre-activation of all possible sentence continuations. Do you agree that this is implausible? Why or why not? 4. In discussing Levy’s (2008) proposals, the authors raise the issue of whether processing behavior at the point of syntactic disambiguation is bimodal or unimodal. Why is this important? How could you tell if there is bimodality? 5. Can you think of predictions made by an account of syntactic processing that assumes parallel activation of multiple alternatives, other than the ones discussed in the article? 6. One possibility that is alluded to briefly in the article is that the reading time advantage obtained by van Gompel and colleagues for globally ambiguous sentences may be because of a failure to fully resolve the ambiguity. Do you know of any specific evidence suggestive of this? Can you think of critical experiments that might address this issue? Topical Outline Syntactic parsing A. Early Models: Heuristics, Delay B. The Garden Path (GP) Model • Focuses on ambiguity resolution • Proposes structural simplicity as primary principle • Assumes a separate reanalysis stage when first-pass parsing fails C. Constraint-Based Models • Simultaneous (optimal) use of many information types • Parallel activation of multiple analyses • Reanalysis as re-weighting or re-ranking D. The State of the Art • Problems for the GP model ○ Evidence for rapid use of non-syntactic information ○ Cases in which parsing preferences do not conform to simplicity metrics • Problems for constraint-based models ○ Failure to show reversals of GP-predicted preferences ○ Failure to show evidence of competition during ambiguity (PRESENT REVIEW GOES HERE) • Emergence of new perspectives ○ Frequency-based accounts ○ Importance of structural prediction.

Reading is a rather complex process in which comprehension at a number of levels is essential. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of how different kinds of variable influence eye movements. We want to stress at the outset that eye movement data are highly informative with respect to understanding reading. They provide a moment-to-moment indicator of the ease (or the difficulty) with which readers are able to comprehend the text that they read. Because eye movements are a natural part of the reading process, secondary tasks are not needed to make inferences about reading comprehension. Rather, information about where readers fixate in the text and how long they look at different part of the text provides remarkably reliable data about comprehension at a number of levels. We will begin with a brief overview of the characteristics of eye movements during reading, which will include a discussion of the different eye movement measures that are typically employed in reading research (these issues are discussed in greater detail in Rayner, 1998, and in Rayner and Pollatsek, forthcoming). We will then discuss in turn: (1) effects of lexical processing on eye movements, (2) effects of syntactic processing on eye movements, and (3) effects of discourse processing on eye movements. Thus, these sections focus on comprehension at the word level, at the level of syntax, and at the level of higher-level discourse. Shillcock (Chapter 6 this volume) also discusses eye movements and word recognition. 19.2 Basic characteristics of eye movements during reading

Readers have to build up a coherent meaning representation of the text they read by integrating each word into its sentence context. How rapidly does this process take place? Context is known to exert a very rapid effect on the interpretation of ambiguous words (Sereno, O’Donnell, & Rayner, 2006; Rayner, Cook, Juhasz, & Frazier, 2006). Furthermore, experiments manipulating the plausibility of a word in context suggest that readers detect implausibility almost immediately (Rayner, Warren, Juhasz, & Liversedge, 2004; Warren, McConnell, & Rayner, 2008). Staub, Rayner, Hyona, Pollatsek, and Majewski (2007) explored this plausibility effect in reading using noun-noun compounds in 1a and 1b: 1a.The new principal talked to the cafeteria manager at the end of the school day. 1b.The new principal visited the cafeteria manager at the end of the school day. The compound cafeteria manager as a whole is fully plausible in both sentences. However, the plausibility of the initial noun (which was always singular) as a head noun was manipulated by varying the preceding verb (talked to or visited). For example, cafeteria is implausible as a head noun at the point it appears in 1a, but the implausibility is eliminated when the next word, manager, is encountered. In 1b, cafeteria is plausible as a head noun, although it turns out to be the left constituent of a compound. Reading times on the left constituent noun were significantly longer when the head noun analysis of this word was implausible than when it was plausible. This result suggests that the parser initially analyzes a singular noun as a head instead of a modifier, and plausibility has an automatic and rapid effect on eye movements. Semantic interpretation appears to proceed on a word-by-word basis, with the apparent implausibility of a word in context influencing eye movements even when the next word removes the implausibility. Most studies on the time course of plausibility effects have been conducted with alphabetic languages. Less is known about this issue with respect to Chinese, a script that differs in many aspects from alphabetic languages. Unlike English (and other alphabetic writing systems), Chinese is a logographic script wherein the written text is formed by strings of equally spaced box-like symbols called characters, which represent the basic units of meaning (morphemes). However, the meaning of a character may not be transparent by itself and can be context-dependent. This is because Chinese words can consist of one to several characters; a character can be a one-character word or a morpheme of a multiple-character word, with markedly different meanings in these two situations. Moreover, there is no explicit marker between words in Chinese. That is, the width of the space between words is identical to that between characters within a word. For example, the ambiguous three-character string “” can be segmented in two ways: (1) the first character is a single character word (meaning flower) and the next two characters form a two-character word (grow), and (2) the first two characters form a two-character word (peanut) and the third character is a single character word (grow). Thus, Chinese readers have to rely largely on context to tell if a character is itself a word, or a constituent morpheme of a multiple-character word, and determine its proper meaning (Chen, 1996, 1999). In addition, grammatical properties of Chinese words are highly context dependent, as most words do not have inflectional markers, or markers of tense or case, that help to specify grammatical category (Chen, 1996; Chen, Song, Lau, Wong, & Tang, 2003). Thus, it has been argued that higher level semantic interpretation for Chinese readers would not be expected to function in an immediate manner (Aaronson & Ferres, 1986). Indeed, a delayed comprehension strategy would be more suitable for building up a coherent representation because it would maximize the amount of information available and minimize the ambiguities encountered. However, there is evidence suggesting that Chinese readers conduct semantic interpretation in an immediate manner. Wang, Chen, Yang, and Mo (2008) reported that Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. They found that a target character which was inconsistent with background information from the early part of a passage yielded increased first-pass reading times (the sum of all fixations on a region prior to moving to another region) on a region consisting of the target character and the character prior to it. Moreover, Yang, Wang, Chen and Rayner (2009) investigated the time course of syntactic and semantic processing in Chinese reading. In their experiment, the relation between a one-character target word and the sentence context was manipulated such that three kinds of sentences were presented: (1) congruent, (2) containing a semantic violation, and (3) containing both a semantic and a syntactic violation. Eye movement data showed that first pass reading times on the target word were longer in the two violation conditions than in the congruent condition, and that the semantic plus syntactic violation caused more severe disruption than did the semantic violation alone. Recall that there are no visual cues in Chinese orthography that highlight word boundaries for readers, and the meaning of a character may be very different when it appears within a multi-character word. The present study addressed the question of whether Chinese readers show the same immediate plausibility effects when a character that would be implausible as a one-character word is, in fact, the first character of a plausible multi-character word, similar to the initial noun of a noun-noun compound in the implausible condition in Staub et al.’s experiment. Thus, the present study sheds light on whether semantic integration of multiple-character words in reading Chinese is performed at a word level or at the character level. Since the majority of multiple-character words in Chinese are two characters (about 60-70%, Liu, 1990), they were used as target words. We made the first character of a two-character target word (which was always plausible in context) either plausible or implausible as an independent word at the point it appeared, by manipulating the verb prior to the target word (similar to Staub et al.). In addition, two other sentence frames were created by replacing the two-character target word with its first character, to establish a baseline plausibility effect for one-character words. Therefore, there were four conditions: (1) a plausible two-character target word with its first character plausible at the point it appeared, (2) a plausible two-character target word with its first character implausible at the point it appeared, (3) a plausible one-character target word, and (4) an implausible one-character target word. We will refer to these conditions as plausible-plausible, plausible-implausible, plausible, and implausible, respectively (see below for example sentences). If semantic interpretation proceeds on a character-by-character basis when reading multiple-character words, a sizable reading time penalty on the first character of a two-character target word (and/or the whole target word) should be observed in the plausible-implausible condition as compared to the plausible-plausible condition. The reading time on the target word in these two conditions should be comparable if semantic interpretation proceeds on a word-by-word basis. Reading times on the one-character target word were expected to be longer in the implausible condition than the plausible condition, replicating the results obtained by Yang et al. (2009).

Measuring where the eyes fixate, and for how long, has arguably been the most valuable way of exploring the time-course of comprehending written sentences. This chapter reviews some of the history of the method’s use as well as some recent developments. It provides an extensive review of what eye movement measurement has told us about the syntactic processing of sentences, covering topics such as syntactic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity resolution, retrieval from memory, syntactic prediction, and syntactic complexity. Alternative models for how syntactic and extra-syntactic information sources are integrated are discussed. The chapter then turns to a discussion of what the eyes actually do in response to syntactic processing complexity, and provides a brief review of models of eye movement control. It concludes by comparing eye movement measurement with other methods of measuring online sentence comprehension processes.

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing strategies (viz., the subject preference), but rather modulates the ease of later reanalysis processes. In Experiment 1, the object case assigned by the verb did not affect the ease of reanalysis. However, the syntactic reanalysis was rendered more difficult when the order of the two arguments violated the specificity/referentiality hierarchy. Experiment 2 revealed that the initial subject preference also holds for verbs favoring an object-initial base order (i.e., dative object-experiencer verbs). However, the advantage for subject-initial sentences is neutralized in relatively late processing stages when the thematic role hierarchy and the specificity hierarchy converge to promote scrambling.

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error) are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error). Two major accounts of this phenomenon make different predictions about where, in the course of incremental processing of an object relative, difficulty should first appear. An account emphasizing memory processes (Gibson, 1998; Grodner & Gibson, 2005) predicts difficulty at the relative clause verb, while an account emphasizing experience-based expectations (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) predicts earlier difficulty, at the relative clause subject. Two eye movement experiments tested these predictions. Regressive saccades were much more likely from the subject noun phrase of an object relative than from the same noun phrase occurring within a subject relative (Experiment 1) or within a verbal complement clause (Experiment 2). This effect was further amplified when the relative pronoun that was omitted. However, reading time was also inflated on the object relative clause verb in both experiments. These results suggest that the violation of expectations and the difficulty of memory retrieval both contribute to the difficulty of object relative clauses, but that these two sources of difficulty have qualitatively distinct behavioral consequences in normal reading.

Speakers frequently make subject–verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and to investigate the relative latency of errors and correct agreement decisions. The presence of a number attractor reliably increased correct RT, and the size of this RT effect was consistently larger in conditions that also had larger effects on accuracy. Number attraction errors, however, were similar in RT to correct responses in the same experimental condition. These results are interpreted as supporting a model according to which an intervening number attractor makes the agreement computation process more difficult in general [Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, K. (2005). Making sense of syntax: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review 112, 531–559], with errors arising probabilistically. However, attraction from a non-intervening noun resulted in only mildly inflated correct RT, but dramatically inflated error RT, suggesting that non-intervening attraction errors may reflect confusion about the structure of the subject phrase.

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing noun-noun compounds that varied in frequency (e.g., elevator mechanic, mountain lion). The left constituent of the compound was either plausible or implausible as a head noun at the point at which it appeared, whereas the compound as a whole was always plausible. When the head noun analysis of the left constituent was implausible, reading times on this word were inflated, beginning with the first fixation. This finding is consistent with previous demonstrations of very rapid effects of plausibility on eye movements. Compound frequency did not modulate the plausibility effect, and all disruption was resolved by the time readers' eyes moved to the next word. These findings suggest (contra Kennison, 2005) that the parser initially analyzes a singular noun as a head instead of a modifier. In addition, the findings confirm that the very rapid effect of plausibility on eye movements is not due to strategic factors, because in the present experiment, unlike in previous demonstrations, this effect appeared in sentences that were globally plausible.

Publisher Summary The two most robust findings in studies of eye movements and reading are that (1) fixation time on a word is shorter if the reader has a valid preview of the word prior to fixating it, and (2) fixation time is shorter when the word is easy to identify and understand. Word recognition processes seem to be reflected quite straightforwardly in the eye movement record. In contrast, eye movements seem to reflect sentence comprehension processes in a more varied fashion. This chapter reviews the major word identification factors that affect eye movements and describe the role these eye movement phenomena have played in developing theories of eye movements in reading. The chapter tabulates and summarizes 100 reports of how syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and world-knowledge factors affect eye movements during reading in an initial attempt to identify order in how different types of challenges to comprehension are reflected in eye movements. The chapter reviews findings that have demonstrated effects due to (1) word frequency, (2) word familiarity, (3) age-of-acquisition, (4) number of meanings, (5) morphology, (6) contextual constraint, and (7) plausibility.

We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted wh-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability-judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted wh-phrases interfere with agreement primarily as a function of their linear and structural position, and that this effect is not significantly modulated by overt case or thematic cues in off-line judgments. We suggest that our findings support a model of agreement processing in which syntactic phrases compete to control agreement on the basis of their structural and linear position with respect to the inflected verb.