Saveria Colonna

Decoupling Syntactic Parsing from Visual Inspection: The Case of Relative Clause Attachment in French

Abstract Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted in order to further examine French readers’ attachment preferences for N1-of-N2-Relative clause (RC) constructions. Experiment 1 manipulated the relative lexical frequency of N1 and N2. Disambiguation was provided by an adjective located within the RC, whose gender agreed either with N1 or N2. First-fixation durations recorded at that point were found to be shorter when gender forced attachment to the lower-frequency noun. The aim of Experiments 2 and 3 was to examine attachment preferences in the case of a short RC (e.g. the relative pronoun followed by an intransitive verb). A general preference for low attachment was found in this case. A tentative explanation, likely to account for both frequency and length effects, is presented, based on the assumption that syntactic parsing can be decoupled from visual inspection in expert reading.

Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution

Abstract This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pronouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addition, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences.

Task-dependency and structure-dependency in number interference effects in sentence comprehension

[This corrects the article on p. 349 in vol. 6, PMID: 25914652.].

Competition Between Primary and Non-Primary Relations During Sentence Comprehension

The four eye-tracking experiments reported examined the way in which Adjunct Predicates (APs) located at the beginning of French sentences of the type “Tired (feminine/masculine) of calling the woman (s/he) left the room” are interpreted and interact with syntactic parsing strategies. The results suggest that the first NP (the woman) was initially interpreted as the potential AP gender controller. Moreover, in the case of gender agreement (the woman is the one who is tired) the syntactic status of the first NP (either the object of the preceding verb or the subject of the main verb) apparently remained ambiguous until the main verb was reached. The implications of these results for Frazier and Cliftons (1996) Construal Theory are discussed.

Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-World Paradigm

The experiments presented here investigated the interplay of language-specific and language-independent factors influencing within-sentence anaphora resolution. Using the visual-world paradigm, we looked at interpretation preferences in French and German. We investigated the effects of both the information status and the grammatical role of the first-mentioned referent on pronoun interpretation. The results show that the effects of grammatical role are different in the two languages: there is a clear lasting preference for the object in French but not in German. Explicitly topicalizing or focusing the first referent, however, has similar effects in the two languages: topicalization leads to more binding of ambiguous pronouns to a potential antecedent than focusing. We argue that this effect is independent of antecedent salience.

Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German

It is widely assumed that focused entities are more salient than non-focused ones and consequently, that an antecedent should be particularly available for a pronoun when it is foregrounded in a cleft construction. Contrary to this assumption, however, some studies observed that an antecedent focused by a cleft was less accessible than a non-focused one. We claim that the influence of clefting depends on the position of the ambiguous pronoun: clefted antecedents are only preferred as antecedents of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are in different discourse units. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire and a visual world experiment in German in which we manipulated inter- vs. intra-sentential pronoun resolution. Results showed that clefting had different effects depending on the position of the pronoun. We will discuss why these results are consistent with the claim that pronouns preferentially co-refer with the sentence topic.

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases.

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.