( A Few) Psycholinguistic Properties of NPs

1. (A Few) Psycholinguistic Properties of NPs http://www.carlosacunafarina.com/ J. CARLOS ACUÑA-FARIÑA UNIVERSITY OF SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

2. STORING X • COMPUTING X • MORPHOLOGY X DIRECTION OF ENCODING X • OPPORTUNISM

3. OUTLINE • 1. Are NPsshy? • 2. Nominal features in comprehension Morphology • 3. Nominal features in production Morphology • 4. Opportunisticbiasses Direction of encoding • 5. Adjunction • 6. Epilogue

4. 1. Are NPsshy?

5. 1. Are NPsshy? • Formal features: case, arbitrarygendermorphology • Semanticfeatures: number, animacy, etcdirection of encoding • Formal/semantic?: arbitrarygender, biologicalgender, number … • INTERACTIONS

6. WHERE TO LOOK? • a. Agreement: copyingorunification of nominal features. Whichfeaturesgetcopiedorunified? • (b. Adjunction).

7. 2. Nominal features in Comprehension: Gender and Number • Greenberg’s (1963) universals 36, 37, and 45, forinstance). • FeatureHierarchy: Person > Number > Gender • Numberisinherenttonouns (Booij 1996) • Singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural. • Women, fire and dangerous things: Corbett, 1991:148; seehisdiscussionofFula’s20 genders, forinstance; pp. 190 ff.

8. Psycholinguisticevidenceforfeaturedifferentiality • (1) a. Theballerinatoldtheskierthatthe doctor wouldblamehimfortheinjury. • b. Theballerinatoldtheskierthatthe doctor wouldblameherfortheinjury • (2) a. Thelandlordtoldthejanitorsthatthefiremanwiththe gas-maskwouldprotecthimfromgettinghurt. • b. Thelandlordtoldthejanitorsthatthefiremanwiththe gas-maskwouldprotectthemfromgettinghurt. • Nicol (1988) • Cross-modal priming

9. (3) QuandoMaria cerca Roberto, (pro) diventaansiosa. • ‘WhenMaria looks for Roberto, shebecomesanxious’. • (4) QuandoMaria cerca Roberto, (pro) diventaansioso. • ‘WhenMaria looks for Roberto, he becomesanxious’. • (5) QuandoMarialo cerca, (pro) diventa ansioso. • ‘WhenMaria looks forhim, he becomesanxious’. • (6) Quandoi Rossilo cercano, (pro) diventa ansioso. • ‘WhenTheRossi look forhim, he becomesanxious • Carminatti (2005): theFeatureHierarchyHypothesis

10. Againstthe FHH: E.R.P.s. • Molinaro et al. (2012: 915)

11. Againstthe FHH: ERPs. • Barber and Carreiras (2005): (4) • GenderViolationNumberviolation *Arroyo helada *Arroyo helados Frozen (fem) stream (masc) Frozen (pl) stream (sg) • GenderviolationNumberviolation *La lago *Los lago The (fem) stream (masc) The (pl) stream (sg)

12. 25 124 25 124 37 105 37 105 60 86 60 86 __Agreement __Number disagreement __ Gender disagreement -5 µV ms 300 500 700 Beginning Middle Barber & Carreiras, JoCN,2005

13. No differences up to 700 ms • Differentrepresentationalloci • Butsame use in processing

14. Againstthe FHH: ERPs. • Barber et al. (2004): • (5) • a. *el faroluminosa/‘theluminous (fem) lighthouse (masc)’ • b. *el abuelodelgada /‘thethin (fem) grandfather’ (masc)’ • Hagoort & Brown (1999), Dutch; Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers (2000), German; Deutsch & Bentin (2001), Hebrew.

15. SO: • Whengender and numberfeatures ‘crash’ as a result of a break in thealliterative, inflectionally-expressedsequence, ERP researchersregisterthetypicalmorphosyntactically-orientedLAN effect (Kutas & Hillyard 1984; Osterhout & Mobley 1995; Munte et al., 1997a, 1997b; Friederici 2002; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky 2006; Kutas & Federmeier 2009; amongothers). However, thateffectismuchhardertoobtainwhenthecrashingisnotinflectionallyobvious. Independently of representationalgrounding.

16. STORING x • COMPUTING

17. THE MORPHOLOGY

18. Epicenes (6) Il PERSONAGGIO [Masc]...Lui Agreement The character [Masc]... he Il PERSONAGGIO[Masc]]...LeiDisagreement The character [Masc] ...she L’erede ......Lei (Lui) Baseline The heir.....she (he) Cacciari et al. (1997, 2011)

19. Reading times

20. TheFeatureMismatcheffect … in English (7) • a. gender match: • When hewas at the party, the boy cruelly teased the girl during the party games. • b. gender mismatch: • When hewas at the party, the girl teased the boy during the party games. • c. control: • When Iwas at the party, the boy cruelly teased the girl during the party games. • Van Gompel & Liversedge (2003) cruelly

21. SO: NOMINAL FEATURES IN COMPREHENSION • STORING X • COMPUTING X • MORPHOLOGY

22. 3. NOMINAL FEATURES IN PRODUCTION • Proximity concord • (a) Theflagonthebalconies… (IS LARGE) • (b) Theflagonthebalconies…(*ARE LARGE)

23. (8a) *Theilliteracylevel of ourchildrenARE appalling. (George Bush, Washington, 23 January 2004) • (8b) Our work is based on the assumption that some key notions of formal syntax, such as intermediate traces, ISdirectly reflected in processing/memory constraints at play in on-line language production. (Franck, Soare, Frauenfelder & Rizzi(2010: 3) • (8c) … the relation of more oblique arguments to the predicate ARE less obvious than those of the central … arguments. (Croft 1988: 169) • (8d) … the nature of the processes that underlie this task ARE complex. (Gillespie & Pearlmutter 2011: 377)

24. (Bock & Miller 1991; Bock & Cutting 1992; Bock, Cutting & Eberhard 1992; and Bock & Eberhard 1993; Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996; Vigliocco & Franck 1999, 2001; Hartsuiker et al. 2001: Eberhard et al. 2005; Franck et al. 2006, 2008, 2010; Haskell et al. 2010; Bock et al. 2011; Acuña-Fariña 2012; inter alia)

25. NOMINAL FEATURES OF FORM • 1. Asymmetry: SG + PL (markedness). • 2. Regulars (boys) and irregulars (men) attract approximately the same. • 3. Boys more than scissors or suds • 4. Army or fleet do not attract whereas soldiers or ships do. • (Bock & Miller 1991; Bock & Eberhard 1993; Nicol et al. 1996; Eberhard1997; Acuña-Fariña 2012, inter alia).

26. NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING: • 1. Distributivity(Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996; Eberhard 1997; Bock et al. 2004, 2011; etc.) (9) Theflagonthebalconies (10) Thebox fortherings

27. NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING: CONCRETENESS Spanishresults English results • A comparison between English and Spanish showed a significant interaction between Language and Abstraction (F1(1, 100)= 53.19; p<.001; F2(1, 28)= 24.41; p<.001): concreteness seems to have a more powerful effect in English than in Spanish. RiveiroOuteiral, Ph. Diss.

28. SO: THE MORPHOLOGY … again…?

29. Lorimor et al. 2008 The role of morphology gs Lorimor et al, 2008

30. LeuvenNP Cfr 2013 Susceptibilitytodistributivity • Foote & Bock (2012) Distributive Non distributive • Mexican .17 .04 • Dominican .31 .06 • English .26 .03

31. AndalusianSpanish • AndalusianSpanish(29 subjects; south; eroded morphology): • Distributive sentences: 84 mistakes (19.4%) • Non-distributive sentences: 14 mistakes (3.2%) • Galician Spanish (30 subjects; north; full morphology): • Distributive sentences: 41 (9.8%) • Non-distributive sentences: 13 (3.1%)

32. However, more thanMorphology: Epicenesagain • Vigliocco& Hartsuiker (2001): • (11) • Un camion ha investito Fabio/Fabiola che correva in bicicletta ascoltando musica • [‘A truck hit Fabio/Fabiola whowasriding a bike whilelistening to music’] • La vittima dello scontro … distratto/distratta [distracted-masc/distracted-fem] • [‘The victim of the accident … distracted’]

33. Ifthe discourse information concerning the sex of the referentistakeninto account in the encoding of subject-predicative adjectiveagreement, errors in gender agreementshould be less common in the congruentthan in the incongruentcondition. • Thisispreciselywhattheyfound: a statisticallysignificantsemanticeffect with the samenouns for which no sucheffectscould be found in a series of comprehensionexperiments (remember: Cacciari et al. 1997, 2011).

34. SO: NOMINAL FEATURES IN COMPREHENSION STORING X • COMPUTING X • MORPHOLOGY • X • DIRECTION OF ENCODING

35. Interimsummary • 1. Nominal features are recruitedto do thesamejob, regardless of theirrepresentationalorigin. • 2. Butmorphologyinteractswithfeaturestrength, • 3. and withthedirection of encoding: formispriviledged in comprehensionespecially in alliterativelanguages (epicenes in Italian vs cataphora in English); meaningleaks more freely in productionespecially in thepoorinflectionlanguages (more distributivity in English than in the Romance languages, German, Russian and Slovak, etc.)

36. 4. OPPORTUNISM • DETERMINER PRODUCTION • how determiner selection mightdiffer from open-class word selection across languages • the picture-word interference task, a variant of the classical Stroop task (Klein 1964; for a review see McLeod 1991)

37. The semantic interference effect andthe phonological facilitation effect. Slower Faster • Assumed to reflect processesat different levels of lexical access. competition at the level of lexical node selection vs priming of the phonological content of the lexical node selected forproduction. CAR BAR

38. DETERMINER PRODUCTION • Schriefers (1993; also Schriefers, Jescheniak & Hantsch 2002, 2005) asked Dutch speakers to produce NPs (e.g., "the redtable") in response to colored pictures. In Dutch, determiners are marked for gender: de is usedfor common (com) gender nouns (e.g., de tafel, ‘the table’, com), and het is used for neuter (neu)gender nouns (e.g., het boek, ‘the book’, neu). Thus, speakers would produce either a de+Adj+ N phrase or a het+Adj+N phrase. • Naming latencies werelonger when targets and distractors had different gender: Gender Congruency Effect. • Acompetitive process that is dependent on its relative level of activation and is not simply anautomatic consequence of selecting a lexical node.

39. However,

40. (12) • a. Iltreno/itreni [the train/the trains] • b. Losgabello/glisgabelli [the stool/the stools] • c. Laforchetta/leforchette [the fork/the forks] • d. Il piccolo treno [the small train] • e. Il piccolo sgabello [the small stool] • f. La piccolaforchetta [the small fork] • g. Iltreno piccolo [literally, the train small] • h. Losgabello piccolo [literally, the stool small] • i. La forchettapiccola [literally, the fork small]

41. the determiners lo/gliare selected if the next word starts with a vowel,with a consonant cluster of the form "s+consonant" or "gn", or with an affricate; • the determinersil/iare selected for all the remaining cases. • Since Italian allows adjectives tooccupy both prenominal and postnominal NP positions, the relevant phonological context for determiner selection is not specified until the major constituents of the phrase are ordered.

42. Compare: lo sgabello / ilpiccolo sgabello / lo sgabellopiccolo. • Two related implications: • 1. the selection of a determiner form is based on a mixture ofphrasal (number), lexical (gender), and phonological features. • 2. determiner selection occurs very latein the process of NP production, the point at which thephonological forms of the noun and adjectives are ordered and inserted into a phonologicalphrase.

43. RESULT? • the picture-word interference task … • Caramazza et al. (2001): Italian, Spanish, French.

44. NOGENDER CONGRUENCY EFFECT. • Late selectionlanguages (Italian, Spanish,and French): • Determiners are selected so late in the production process that the activation ofpotentially competing information has long dissipated and hence cannot interfere with theselection of the target determiner (see Miozzo & Caramazza 1999)

45. SO: NOMINAL FEATURES STORING X • COMPUTING X • MORPHOLOGY X DIRECTION OF ENCODING X • OPPORTUNISM

46. 5. NOMINAL FEATURES OF MEANING IN ADJUNCTION • (13) Somebodyshottheservant of theactresswhowasonthebalcony • Whoshotwho?  Someoneshottheactress’ servant • Whowasonthebalcony?  ???

47. ADJUNTION (SYNTACTIC) AMBIGUITY

48. How do wesolveambiguityproblems? Attachmentstrategies CNP DET NOM the N1 PP PREP servant NP RC Early closure of DET N2 whowasonthebalcony actress the Late closure

49. Features of meaning in adjunction: ANIMACY in DUTCH • Desmet, Brysbaert, & DeBaecke (2002): COMPLETION • Desmet, DeBaecke, Drieghe, Brysbaert, & Vonk (2006): COMPREHENSION • Astrong propensity to attach the RC high to the first NP when this coded an animate referent. • Afine grain of analysis: lexical properties of the nouns composing a syntactic structure have a role in shaping adjunction preferences, • Desmetet al., (2006)confirmed the role of animacy and extended their research to the concrete/abstract distinction: when the first noun was both animate and concrete (daughter, boy, girl) as opposed to animate and abstract (government, staff, committee and the like), RC attraction was strongest.

50. (14) The decisions of the president that … The documents of the president that …. The organizations of the president that … The advisors of the president that …. Acuña-Fariña et al., (2009): A-A, A-I, I-A, and I-I (corpus +self-paced reading) NP1 bias except in I-A condition But: MUCH STRONGER IN CORPUS