When Grammar and Parsing Agree

An electrophysiological exploration of modifiers embedded in different hierarchies: Insight from short passives in Mandarin

This event-related potentials study explored the processing of Mandarin short passives. We used a syntactic violation paradigm to compare the processing of two auxiliary phrases (i.e., a verb-modifier di-phrase and a noun-modifier de-phrase). In the control condition, the syntactic hierarchy of the di-phrase was lower than that of the de-phrase. In the violation condition, the low-level violation was created by replacing di with de in the auxiliary phrase, while the high-level violation was created by replacing de with di in the auxiliary phrase. The ERP data showed that the noun-modifier elicited the greater left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600 than the verb-modifier, in both the control condition and the violation condition. We also observed that the LAN induced by the verb-modifier phrase was greater in the control condition than that in the violation condition, while the LAN induced by the noun-modifier was greater in the violation condition than that in the control condition. These results suggested that the greater cortical LAN-P600 might differentiate the high-level hierarchy from the low-level hierarchy. In addition, we tentatively claimed that given the same predicate argument structure, long passives might be the default representational mode of short passives (generally, a constructional alternation might be activated during the processing of the target structure).

Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension

This work explores gender agreement attraction in comprehension. Attraction occurs when an agreement error (such as, "the key to the cabinets are rusty") goes unnoticed, leading to the illusion of grammaticality due to a mismatch between the value of the head and the value of a local intervening phase (attractor). According to retrieval accounts, these errors occur during cue retrieval from memory and predict illusions of grammaticality. Alternatively, representational accounts predict that the errors occur due to the faulty representation of certain features, thus, illusions of ungrammaticality are also expected. In four experiments we explore: (a) whether gender agreement attraction occurs in Greek and the strategy/-ies employed, (b) the role of the agreement target, (c) the timing of gender agreement attraction, (d) the role of phonological matching between the nominal inflectional morphemes of the attractor and the agreement target, and (e) participants' sensitivity to agreement when there is no conflict from the attractor. In all four experiments, the grammaticality of the sentence and the attractor value (match or mismatch with the head) and also the phonological matching between the attractor and the agreement target in ungrammatical sentences were manipulated. The agreement target was either an adjectival predicate or an object-clitic and the gender value of the head was feminine or neuter. Attraction was found in all measures during the time-course of adjectival predicates (Experiment 1) and object-clitics (Experiment 2), and in timed (Experiment 3), and untimed (Experiment 4) judgments. Even more, both gender values showed attraction and the results mainly suggest that participants experience illusions of grammaticality, confirming retrieval accounts. Phonological matching did not modulate attraction in any of the experiments, suggesting that the similarity in the morphophonological realization between the agreement target and the attractor does not increase attraction. Furthermore, participants were sensitive to gender agreement violations in the absence of gender mismatch between the head and the attractor, suggesting that they respect agreement rules and have both neuter and feminine available in their feature content repertoire, although with some tendency in favor of neuter in feminine agreement contexts. The impact of these findings is discussed within the concept of attraction and sensitivity to agreement violations.

Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g., ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative adverb never (e.g., The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences were studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (Experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (Experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips' (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights into the complexity of multiple negations and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability.