Abstract
I marshal several lines of empirical support for the claim that the human sentence processing mechanism (HSPM) constructs representations of the syntactic structures of linguistic stimuli—what I call “mental phrase markers” (MPMs). Powerful neurocognitive evidence for this hypothesis is drawn from recent EEG and MEG studies. Further support comes from studies of structural priming and garden-path processing, which provide insight into the structure of MPMs. Structural priming involves modulating the speed of behavioral responses by exciting certain MPMs prior to a task. In the case of garden-path processing, the HSPM encounters a locally ambiguous input and resolves the ambiguity in a way that turns out to be incorrect. The principles of ambiguity resolution that are operative in such cases all seem to make direct ineliminable reference to MPMs. Finally, I discuss various attempts to demonstrate the psychological reality of so-called “empty categories”. The available evidence suggests that wh-traces are psychologically real and that the HSPM employs sophisticated strategies in searching for them, making use of both grammatical constraints and cues provided by their antecedents. In the concluding section, I discuss whether the contents of MPMs can help us decide which grammar the HSPM employs in on-line processing.
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- 1.
Studies of sign language processing are quite rare, but they do exist. See, e.g., Bavelier, D., Corina, D. P., and Neville, H. J. (1998). “Brain and Language: A Perspective from Sign Language Properties of ASL,” Neuron, Vol. 21, pp. 275–278, and references therein.
- 2.
It perhaps goes without saying that an insistence on the primacy of behavioral and neural data is not an expression of behaviorist or crypto-eliminativist principles, particularly as my conclusion is that certain processes and representations are psychologically real. If insisting on the primacy of third-person data were a sign of an underlying philosophical agenda, it would be anti-Cartesianism—a methodology that de-emphasizes wanton intuition mongering and the deliverances of consciousness and introspection. The fruitlessness of Cartesian theorizing is apparent not only from the historical failure of nineteenth-century introspectionist psychology (Lyons 1986; Kukla and Walmsley 2006), but also from the pitfalls that psycholinguistics encounters when relying on introspection (Kartunnen and Zwicky 1985: p. 22; Tanenhaus et al. 1985).
- 3.
Reflecting a bias that pervades the present work—indeed, the entire field of psycholinguistics—I focus largely on comprehension. In production, the inputs to real-time computations are presumably what philosophers call “propositional attitudes”—judgments, desires, intentions, and so forth. Chomsky often refers to the inputs as “states of the conceptual-intentional system,” leaving open the relation between these states and propositional attitudes. At present, the issues surrounding linguistic production are relatively murky, though work by Kay Bock and others has yielded important advances in our understanding. It is, moreover, an open question what exactly constitutes the output of comprehension. In general, empirical issues concerning non-peripheral cognitive states—the propositional attitudes or states of the “conceptual-intentional system”—are less tractable than one would have hoped.
- 4.
Many theorists were persuaded by the arguments in Fodor et al. (1974) that the transformations posited by a variety of syntactic theories are not psychologically real operations. Fodor, Bever, and Garrett argued against what they called the derivational theory of complexity (DTC), on the basis of a number of experimental findings. Following Berwick and Weinberg (1984: ch. 2), Phillips (1994, 1996) and Phillips and Lewis (2013), I doubt that the findings do in fact disconfirm the DTC. (Phillips and Lewis write: “We do not mean to claim that the DTC was substantiated, but the reports of its defeat strike us as somewhat stylized history.”) Nevertheless, I am aware of no empirical grounds for positing D-structure representations in the course of sentence processing.
- 5.
In view of the notoriously shaky status of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, I simply slur over it in what follows, labeling various properties of sentences ‘semantic’ regardless of whether they would be classified as semantic or pragmatic by a theorist who insists on drawing the distinction.
- 6.
The sudden rash of scare-quotes reflects the extreme caution with which we must proceed here. Further studies may well show that this categorization of the phenomena is in need of revision. For instance, Stroud and Phillips (2010) report an array of findings that cast doubt on the initial picture of the N400. None of the findings they report, however, seem to affect the argument here. For, they do not challenge the claim that the ELAN is an unambiguous reflection of distinctly syntactic violations. Furthermore, the refinements they suggest to our interpretation of the ERP signal known as the P600 do no violence to the analysis presented above.
- 7.
- 8.
See, for instance, Levelt, W. J. M. (1970). “A Scaling Approach to the Study of Syntactic Relations,” in d’Arcais, G. B. F. and Levelt, W. J. M. (eds.), Advances in Psycholinguistics, pp. 109–121. North-Holland, Amsterdam.
- 9.
Clark and Clark (1977) discuss the methodological problems of the early experiments.
- 10.
This formulation is somewhat loose. For a fine-grained distinction between priming and persistence, see Pickering and Ferreira (2008: p. 428). The additional details do not affect the present argument.
- 11.
Bock (1989) finds priming across sentences with different prepositions—e.g., ‘to’ and ‘for’.
- 12.
This contradicts a contention of Devitt (2006a) to the effect that there may well be no modality-neutral language faculty. Pickering and Ferreira discuss what they take to be “strong evidence that at least those aspects of structural knowledge that underlie structural priming are modality independent—they are used in the same way both when speaking and when writing” (p. 439).
- 13.
See Pickering and Ferreira (2008: p. 428) for a detailed list of references.
- 14.
Below, I discuss the much-studied question of whether the HSPM constructs representations that include empty categories, such as wh-traces, PRO, pro, and NP-traces. These are posited by the Government and Binding theory, but not by (some versions of) competing grammatical frameworks, such as Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag, 1994) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan, 1978, 2001). The Government and Binding framework posits wh-traces and NP-traces at S-structure and at the distinct level of representation, LF. As has been widely noted, there is no need for a parser or a generator to construct D-structure representations, given that all of the information in those representations is already encoded by antecedent-trace relations at S-structure. See, for instance, Fodor (1989: p. 178). The most recent incarnation of transformational grammar in the Principles and Parameters tradition—viz., the Minimalist Program—does away with the level of D-structure altogether. I discuss Minimalist parsing models in Chap. 9.
- 15.
Phillips and Lewis (2013) discuss an issue raised by the studies reviewed above. Structural priming has been observed between sentences that, from the point of view of a sophisticated syntactic theory (e.g., Government and Binding theory), exhibit fine-grained syntactic differences. That is, for the purpose of structural priming, syntactic structure A might be “the same as” syntactic structure B, even though A and B are, in detail, quite different. But this doesn’t show that the MPMs constructed by the HSPM fail to conform to fine-grained grammars. As Phillips and Lewis point out, all this shows is that “the structural priming paradigm is a relatively blunt tool for investigating structure, because relatively coarse-grained similarity between structures is sufficient to cause structural priming. This would leave open the possibility that on-line processes build fine-grained structures” (p. 13).
- 16.
Here, I assume a serial architecture. Parallel models will build multiple grammatically licensed structures and rank them. Serial and parallel models yield identical observable results in most (though not all) psycholinguistic experiments. When a serial model makes a mistake, it incurs extra computational load by being forced to backtrack. When a parallel model does so, the extra computational load is devoted to re-ranking the parses stored in working memory at that point. For further discussion of this issue, see Crocker, Pickering and Clifton (2000). Note also that I am not equating parallel models with constraint-satisfaction models (to be discussed later in this section). As a matter of sociology, these tend to be associated. But, as Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky (2009: p. 106, fn. 5) point out, the question of whether the HSPM constructs mental phrase markers in parallel is logically distinct from the question of what information it uses to resolve local ambiguities or to rank the parses it constructs. (For instance, Gibson, 1991 endorses a parallel parsing model, but not of the constraint-satisfaction variety.) Nor should we simply assume that parallel parsing models will have a connectionist architecture. The best-known parsing models for classical computational architectures employ the CYK algorithm or the Earley algorithm, both of which are parallel, in the sense that they store all possible parses consistent with the grammar in a data structure known as a “table” or a “chart.” (See Jurafsky and Martin, 2008: ch. 12.) I discuss these algorithms in Chap. 8.
- 17.
For an extensive discussion of the eye-tracking paradigm, see Rayner (1998).
- 18.
“The fact that hearers are not always conscious of having made a mistake in the analysis of such sentences (as they are for notorious garden-paths such as The horse raced past the barn fell) is not, we submit, a good argument against this kind of perceptual complexity” (Frazier and Fodor 1978: p. 296). See Pritchett (1992: p. 33) for illuminating reflections on this point. Briefly, Pritchett argues that although conscious reflection cannot tell us anything about sentence processing, the fact that some processing difficulties are consciously registered while others are not nevertheless constitutes evidence that the former are more serious than the latter.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
Frazier (1979) examines in detail the merits and drawbacks of Kimball’s approach. A more recent treatment appears in Pritchett (1992: pp. 26–30), where Kimball’s work is situated in the context of subsequent theories of sentence processing. Pritchett’s own theory of sentence processing is directly inspired by Kimball’s work, though it draws on a more recent grammar, to which Kimball did not have access.
- 22.
- 23.
Empty categories are sometimes called “aphonic” or “phonologically null” categories, because they are not spoken or heard (Schiffer, forthcoming). Of course, outside of linguistics textbooks, empty categories are also orthographically null.
- 24.
This is an oversimplification. For details regarding the way in which LFG and HPSG treat wh-constructions and relative clauses see Bresnan (1978, 2001) and Pollard and Sag (1994), respectively. For a briefer treatment of the issue, with a focus on its relevance for psycholinguistics, see Fodor (1989: pp. 177–186) and Featherston (2001).
- 25.
As noted at the end of Chap. 4, there are methodological grounds for initially favoring the hypothesis that the HSPM employs whatever grammar happens to satisfy the desiderata of formal linguistic theory. For further discussion of this issue, see Steedman 1985: p. 361; 2000: pp. 227–8; Fodor 1989: pp. 177–8; Featherston 2001: pp. 2–3. Still, the hypothesis may well be false; the psychologically real grammar might not meet the compactness constraints imposed by syntacticians (Soames, 1984; Stabler, 1984).
- 26.
The second conjunct is equivalent to what Frazier and Clifton (1989) refer to as the “Active Filler Hypothesis.” I use the locution ‘gap/trace’ to avoid commitment to grammatical formalisms that have traces and movement operations in their theoretical toolkit.
- 27.
Priming studies had, by this time, demonstrated quite clearly that the recognition of a word primes the recognition of semantically related words.
- 28.
Recall that NP-traces are posited by the Government and Binding theory to account for the relation between a verb and its object in passive sentences like (65) and raising constructions like (70), both repeated here:
(65)
[ NP The boat] i was carried NP-trace i by five people.
(70)
Igor i seems NP-trace i to enjoy action movies.
- 29.
Featherston discusses many experiments that were performed between the late 1980s and his own 2001 studies. For the sake of brevity, I have not mentioned these here. Their implications were taken into account in the design of Featherston’s experiments.
- 30.
The first experiment was argued to be flawed. The sixth made use of an experimental paradigm known as sentence matching, which we have not introduced here.
- 31.
For reasons of space, we have not discussed tough-movement constructions in this chapter. An example of such a construction is ‘Larisa is tough to convince’, where the adjective ‘tough’ seems to raise the object of the verb ‘convince’ to the subject position in the higher clause. There are numerous syntactic analyses of this construction and there is, as yet, no convergence amongst syntacticians as to what its underlying structure is. Here, we simply note that Government and Binding theory treats it as containing multiple empty categories, including wh-trace.
- 32.
To avoid the ambiguity in the term ‘control’, Featherston refers to syntactic-control verbs as equi-verbs, reserving the term ‘control’ for the baseline measure in an experiment.
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Pereplyotchik, D. (2017). Mental Phrase Markers in Sentence Processing. In: Psychosyntax. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 129. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60066-6_5
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