Abstract
For gathering data on syntax-prosody relations, it has been unclear how to proceed experimentally. This is especially so for complex syntactic structures, such as the doubly center-embedded relative clause construction, which is syntactically well-formed but notoriously difficult to parse. These complex sentences can be especially revealing theoretically but cannot easily be elicited from speakers by presentation of picture choices or written preambles. While acknowledging that it may not be ideal, many studies of these and other complex constructions have resorted to a simple methodology in which written target sentences are read aloud. A basic methodological decision is then whether or not to permit (or encourage) the reader to preview the text before voicing it aloud. The results of reading with preview and of reading ‘cold’ without preview can both be informative, but in different ways. Reading without preview taps on-line performance, which can reveal possible syntactic/semantic expectations, and may shed light on the implicit prosody of silent reading. Reading with preview should provide a better window on prosodic competence: the reader’s inherent knowledge of the prosody/syntax alignment principles of the grammar. However, we maintain that previewing by reading aloud, as in the Double Reading design that we report on here, can be more informative of prosodic competence than the typical silent reading preview.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 31st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of California, Davis. We give special thanks to Jack Castronovo for the online implementation of our methodology and to Jessica Spensieri for her work measuring reaction times.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Another common variant in the literature is “The rat the cat the dog chased ate died,” as found in Hudson (1996).
- 2.
We have not so far gathered formal data on judged acceptability of 2CE-RC items all of which are read only silently throughout a whole experimental session. Informal post-experiment debriefing reports, however, overwhelmingly indicate that processability differences such as between (3a) and (3b) are evident even in a silent reading preview prior to any reading aloud task.
- 3.
Corpus data from Sampson (1996) and others confirm that they are indeed quite rare, at least in English and in conversational contexts. For data on some other languages see, for example, Karlsson (2007) and references there. There is an extensive literature. Many alternative explanations have been proposed over the years.
- 4.
We do not distinguish here between primary vs. secondary stress, though that might be a topic of interest for future studies.
- 5.
We piloted this methodology on the internet due to limited access to a local participant pool. As a result, some recruited participants had equipment that did not consistently produce a recorded timing click. Their data was set aside. The data presented in this paper are all from participants who consistently had a recorded timing click, and thus a measurably brief reaction time. For anyone wishing to evaluate or extend our Double Reading findings, we therefore recommend conducting this experiment in-lab if possible.
- 6.
By ‘breaks’ here we refer to prosodic juncture roughly in the sense of ToBI, i.e., tonal alignment and/or segmental or suprasegmental cues that signaled the end of a prosodic domain (Beckman & Elam, 1997). Our analysis diverges from ToBI in that we examined a restricted set of possible juncture sites, and did not employ the four-tiered scale for labelling the strength of junctures.
- 7.
Note from Tables 2 and 3 that the ‘non-optimal’ category comprises multiple prosodic patterns that have been collapsed for the sake of this report. This means that if readers had been choosing one of the scored patterns at random, the chance of selecting the ‘optimal’ prosody in a single NP or VP region is 20%, not 50% (4% for both regions in a single sentence), far less than found in our data, especially on R2 (see Sect. 3.1).
References
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.
Beckman, M. E., & Elam, G. A. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI labelling, version 3.0. Resource document. The Ohio State University Research Foundation. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~agus/tobi/labelling_guide_v3.pdf.
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In John R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and Language Development (279–362). New York: Wiley & Sons.
Blumenthal, A. L. (1970). Language and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics. John Wiley: Oxford, England.
Fodor, J. D., Nickels, S., & Schott, E. (2018). Center-embedded sentences: What’s pronounceable is comprehensible. In R. G. de Almeida & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), On concepts, modules, and language: Cognitive science at its core (pp. 139–168). New York: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A., & Garrett, M. (1967). Some syntactic determinants of sentential complexity. Perception & Psychophysics, 2(7), 289–296.
Fodor, J. D., & Nickels, S. (2011). Pronouncing and comprehending center-embedded sentences. Cambridge, MA: Poster presented at 50 Years of Linguistics at MIT: A Scientific Reunion.
Frazier, L., Clifton, C., & Carlson, K. (2004). Don’t Break, or do: Prosodic boundary preferences. Lingua, 114(1), 3–27.
Frazier, L. (1985). Syntactic complexity. In D. Dowty, L. Karttunen, & H. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural language parsing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6(4): 291–325.
Ghini, M. (1993). Φ-formation in Italian: A new proposal. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 12(2), 41–78.
Gibson, E., & Thomas, J. (1999). Memory limitations and structural forgetting: The perception of complex ungrammatical sentences as grammatical. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14(3), 225–248.
Hudson, R. (1996). The difficulty of (so-called) self-embedded structures. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 283–314.
Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Jun, S.-A. (2010). The implicit prosody hypothesis and overt prosody in English. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7), 1201–1233.
Karlsson, F. (2007). Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses. Journal of Linguistics, 43, 365–392.
Lewis, E., & Nakayama, M. (2001). Syntactic and positional similarity effects in the processing of Japanese embeddings. In Nakayama, M (Ed.), Sentence processing in east asian languages, CSLI Publications.
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. 419–491). New York, London: Wiley.
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistic computing [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistic Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
RStudio Team. (2016). RStudio: Integrated development for R [Computer software]. Boston, MA: RStudio, Inc. http://www.rstudio.com/.
Sampson, G. (1996). From central embedding to empirical linguistics. In J. Thomas & M. Short (Eds.), Using corpora for language research (pp. 14–26). London: Longman.
Truckenbrodt, H. (1999). On the relation between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases. Linguistic Inquiry, 30(2), 219–255.
Wickham, H. (2009). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis [Computer software]. New York: Springer. http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fodor, J.D., Macaulay, B., Ronkos, D., Callahan, T., Peckenpaugh, T. (2019). Center-Embedded Sentences: An Online Problem or Deeper?. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01562-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01563-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)