On the Shallow Processing (Dis)Advantage: Grammar and Economy

Bound Variable Singular They Is Underspecified: The Case of All vs. Every

The goal of this article is to investigate the factors that affect the acceptability and processing of they. Previous research has sought to determine whether there are acceptability and processing differences between they/themselves with plural vs. singular antecedents, with mixed results. The studies reported here address this question using bound variable singular they (e.g., Every customer claimed that they were first in line). We asked whether bound singular they is sensitive to both the morphological number and the semantic distributivity of the binding quantifier phrase. We contrasted morphologically singular quantified antecedents (every and each) with plural quantified antecedents (all). Instead of finding an effect of number, we found an effect of semantic distributivity in acceptability, with bound singular they demonstrating a cline of preference toward more distributive antecedents. Neither number nor distributivity, however, registered as an effect on reading times. Rather, for all types of quantified antecedents, encountering a pronoun like he or she rather than they registered a processing delay, in contrast to non-quantified antecedents. Our results are most fully compatible with the view that they is underspecified for number properties.

Reliance on semantic and structural heuristics in sentence comprehension across the lifespan

People sometimes misinterpret the sentences that they read. One possible reason suggested in the literature is a race between slow bottom-up algorithmic processing and "fast and frugal" top-down heuristic processing that serves to support fast-paced communication but sometimes results in incorrect representations. Heuristic processing can be both semantic, relying on world knowledge and semantic relations between words, and structural, relying on structural economy. Scattered experimental evidence suggests that reliance on heuristics may change from greater reliance on syntactic information in younger people to greater reliance on semantic information in older people. We tested whether the reliance on structural and semantic heuristics changes with age in 137 Russian-speaking adolescents, 135 young adults, and 77 older adults. In a self-paced reading task with comprehension questions, participants read unambiguous high- versus low-attachment sentences that were either semantically plausible or implausible: i.e., the syntactic structure either matched or contradicted the semantic relations between words. We found that the use of top-down heuristics in comprehension increased across the lifespan. Adolescents did not rely on structural heuristics, in contrast to young and older adults. At the same time, older adults relied on semantic heuristics more than young adults and adolescents. Importantly, we found that top-down heuristic processing was faster than bottom-up algorithmic processing: slower reading times were associated with greater accuracy specifically in implausible sentences.

What structural priming can and cannot reveal

The nature of mental representations of linguistic expressions in relation to the time course from intention to articulation is a major issue. We discuss Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) proposal to use structural priming to tap into this process. We show that their interpretation of their findings cannot be maintained. We reinterpret these results and suggest a revision of their conclusions.

Grammar of binding in the languages of the world: Unity versus diversity

Cole, Hermon, and Yanti (2015) present a number of far-reaching conclusions about language universals on the basis of their study of the anaphoric systems of the Austronesian languages of Indonesia. The present contribution critically assesses these conclusions. It reports a further set of data, and shows that contra to what these authors argue, the systems they discuss can be straightforwardly accounted for by a simple set of universal principles plus properties of the vocabulary of the languages involved. I conclude this article with some remarks on acquisition.