Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
‘>’ reads as ‘is more prominent than’. Note that these hierarchies directly translate into corresponding linearization principles. In the following, we will subsume both usages under the cover term ‘hierarchy’.
- 2.
Note that this facilitation in reanalysis is reduced if the object-experiencer verbs permit an agentive reading of the nominative argument, as is the case with accusative object-experiencer verbs in German (see Scheepers et al. 2000).
- 3.
Abbreviations: sg – singular; pl – plural; amb – ambiguity between nominative, accusative, and dative case; acc – accusative verb; dat – dative-active verb.
- 4.
Whereas bare plurals may lead to an ambiguity between a non-specific and a specific (generic) reading (Carlson 1977), it suffices for the purposes of the present manipulation that, even under a specific reading, they are still outranked by proper names on the definiteness/referentiality scales. In contrast to bare plurals, which denote sets of entities, proper nouns are uniquely identifiable.
- 5.
Bare plurals and proper names also differed with respect to word frequency. Specifically, bare plurals were less frequent than proper names (mean log frequency class 15.37 vs. 10.97, where higher values indicate lower frequency; cf. www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de). A main effect of NP type on the critical noun phrases in unadjusted and residual reading times would thereby be confounded by lexical processing of a low-frequency vs. a high-frequency word. Accordingly, we could expect a main effect of NP on the verb region with longer reading times if the verb immediately followed a bare plural (as the preview benefit is limited because of enhanced foveal load on the long, low-frequency plural; cf. Henderson and Ferreira 1990; Rayner 1998). However, throughout both experiments, this prediction was not borne out, as we found increased reading times if the verb immediately followed the high-frequency proper name. Additionally, there were interactions of NP type with the other two factors suggesting that the disadvantage for bare plurals is locally resolved while fixating the respective NP. More importantly, syntactic reanalysis effects affected fixation durations on both NP regions regardless of NP order in Experiment 1 (cf. total times on NP1) and there were differential effects for bare plurals and proper names depending on the verb in Experiment 2. Overall, these effects cannot be accounted for by frequency differences.
- 6.
At a first glance, the interaction between word order and NP type in the early eye-tracking record for NP1 could be taken to suggest that readers already obtained syntactic cues to guide their initial structural interpretation while fixating the first case-ambiguous NP. This information would need to be obtained parafoveally from the second word (word n + 2) to the right of the currently fixated word, which is known as a parafoveal-on-foveal effect (for a recent overview, see Kennedy 2008). The effect was most apparent when the short proper name intervened between bare plural and disambiguating verb, which is in accordance with previous results showing that parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n + 2 especially occur when word n + 1 is rather short (cf. Kliegl et al. 2007). However, several points render the assumption of a parafoveal-on-foveal effect less likely. First, we still observed reanalysis costs on the disambiguating region in the same conditions that showed the supposed parafoveal-on-foveal effect. In fact, the data in go-past time for the disambiguating verb suggest that reanalysis was even more difficult to accomplish in these cases. Second, the proper name (word n + 1) in our experiment was almost about twice as long as the length usually reported for word n + 1 when there were parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n + 2. Apparently, these effects are most likely to occur when word n + 1 does not exceed more than three letters in length (cf. Angele et al. 2008). Finally, there is no corresponding effect on NP1 in our second experiment which used an identical set of NPs. Altogether, these facts speak against a parafoveal-on-foveal effect.
- 7.
Note that the verb types did not differ with respect to token frequency. Hence, the prolonged fixation durations for dative verbs do not reflect a lexical frequency effect. Nevertheless, since the class of dative-assigning verbs is less frequent than the class of accusative-assigning verbs, the disadvantage for dative verbs could also be due to type frequency. However, in contrast to a thematically-based account (see the main text), a frequency-based account does not provide an explanation for the interaction between verb type and noun phrase prominence.
- 8.
This is also expected under the assumption that scrambled bare-plural objects in German entail a generic, nonspecific interpretation, whereas non-scrambled bare plural objects can only receive an existential interpretation (cf. Kratzer 1995). With regard to bare plural subjects, it has been proposed that the interpretation of bare plurals depends on whether they appear as subjects of either stage-level or individual-level predicates, with only stage-level predicates allowing for a generic interpretation (Diesing 1992; Kratzer 1995). By contrast, more recent investigations assume only non-existential readings for bare plural subjects (cf. Kallulli 2006). A post-hoc inspection of the verbs used here revealed that the majority of them in fact belonged to stage-level predicates. However, in our experiment, bare plurals were semantically ambiguous because case-ambiguous NPs in a verb-final clause cannot provide information about word order. Due to this inherent ambiguity, and since we presented isolated sentences, we cannot rule out that readers preferred to give initial bare plurals an existential and specific interpretation. Nevertheless, as argued in the introduction to Experiment 1, bare plurals are still lower in referentiality than proper names even under these circumstances and therefore lower on the overall definiteness/specificity hierarchy.
- 9.
Note, however, that this conclusion may require some refinement when applied to unambiguously case marked arguments. In a series of eye-tracking experiments in Korean, Lee et al. (2007) found effects of both the definiteness and the person hierarchy as early as in gaze duration on the critical noun phrases that were unambiguously marked for nominative case. Despite this temporal difference, their findings are by and large in accordance with our results reported above as they confirm that the convergence of prominence hierarchies facilitates comprehension.
- 10.
Though Haupt et al. (2008), who examined identical sentence structures to Schlesewsky and Bornkessel (2006) using auditory presentation, do not report ERP data for the position of the participle, these can be found in Haupt’s (2008) dissertation. Like Schlesewsky and Bornkessel’s (2006) findings, the results of this study revealed a negativity for accusative in comparison to dative verbs.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Chuck Clifton and Markus Philipp for their helpful comments. The research reported here was performed while the first author was a PhD fellow in the DFG Graduate Program NeuroAct “Neuronal representation and action control” (GK 885) at the University of Marburg, and while I.B.S. and D.R. were at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
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Kretzschmar, F., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., Staub, A., Roehm, D., Schlesewsky, M. (2012). Prominence Facilitates Ambiguity Resolution: On the Interaction Between Referentiality, Thematic Roles and Word Order in Syntactic Reanalysis. In: Lamers, M., de Swart, P. (eds) Case, Word Order and Prominence. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1463-2_11
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