Jana Häussler

Toward a model of grammaticality judgments

This paper presents three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality. In the first two experiments, two different groups of participants judged sentences by the method of magnitude estimation and by the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in a single session. The two experiments involved identical sentence materials but they differed in the order in which the two procedures were applied. The results show a high correlation between the magnitude estimation data and the speeded grammaticality judgments data, both within a session and across the two sessions. The third experiment was a questionnaire study in which participants judged the same sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical without time pressure. This experiment yielded results quite similar to those of the other two experiments. Thus gradient and binary judgments both provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory when assessed in an experimentally controlled way. We present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments. Finally, we compare our experimental results to existing corpus data in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage.

A New Diagnostic for Cyclic Wh-Movement: Discourse Particles in German Questions

This article presents novel evidence for cyclic wh-movement. Two experiments show that the question-sensitive particle denn in German is more readily accepted when occurring in an independent interrogative clause than in a dependent clause embedded in a wh-question. Importantly, however, acceptance of denn in a dependent clause increases significantly when a wh-phrase has been moved out of that clause. We argue that denn is locally licensed by an interrogative Force head. In dependent clauses, this licensing can be mediated by long wh-movement leaving a transient representation of interrogative force in Spec,CP. Without such a mediating trace in Spec,CP, the licensing of the particle fails. In conclusion, denn in a dependent clause indicates cyclic wh-movement.

An interference account of the missing-VP effect

Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures.

Grammar- Versus Frequency-Driven Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: The Case of Double-Object Constructions

With regard to argument serialization, a number of prominence hierarchies have been proposed. We discuss possible ways how such hierarchies might be involved in the reverse process, the process of recovering syntactic functions from a given input string during human language comprehension. We present three experiments and an accompanying corpus study focusing on German sentences with two locally ambiguous objects, both filled by animate NPs. Temporarily, the two objects can be parsed as ‘accusative object preceding dative object’ and as ‘dative object preceding accusative object’. Our results show a strong preference for the order ‘ACC before DAT’. We explore the consequences of this finding for both grammar and frequency based approaches to the human parsing mechanism. We show that accounts in which units of size greater than a single DP can compete with each other are difficult to maintain given our experimental results. We argue instead that our results are best explained in terms of a ranking between cases/syntactic functions, reflecting both the case hierarchy and the frequency ranking that we found in our corpus data.