Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm.

People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments.

Effects of (in)transitivity on structure building and agreement.

The present investigation demonstrates that incremental sentence processing is guided by principles of minimal structure building. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to a local number mismatch between an auxiliary and a subsequent noun phrase revealed that the subject preference, a strategy known to be very robust during processing, can be overridden when information about a verb's valency (i.e., the number and type of arguments a verb requires) is available. Using verb-initial sentences, the ERP data revealed a left anterior negativity for the local number mismatch at the noun phrase following the finite verb compared to a locally matching condition in conditions with intransitive verbs, but no effect following conditions with transitive verbs. This indicates that grammar-internal information guides minimal structure formation, such that verbs that require only one argument reveal an immediate mismatch effect, while verbs that require two arguments neglect the subject preference and opt for an alternative interpretation in light of the number mismatch. The study reveals that the decisions made at this point have consequences for the processing of subsequent elements within the sentence. Using coordination constructions (e.g., the dancer and the singer), the study reports additional ERP results at the coordinating conjunction and at the second noun phrase of the coordination, which provide further evidence that verb valency is taken into consideration during incremental parsing and can override local agreement expectations.

Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions.

Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it. The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when). Further, in a small pilot study directly comparing a sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases that may induce a stress clash (I'd like to know who hid it where when) with a sentence violating Superiority but avoiding the final adjacent wh-phrases (I'd like to know where who hid it when), half the participants indicated that the Superiority violation sentence sounded better. This suggests that the status of some additional-wh sentences may appear to improve simply because the comparison sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases is degraded. Overall, the results of the studies suggest that there is no need to complicate syntactic theory to account for the additional-wh effect, because there is no general additional-wh effect.

Word order variation in spatial descriptions with adverbs.

Previous research has shown that in a three-term spatial reasoning task, the second premise of a German premise pair is especially easy to comprehend if (1) the prepositional object rather than the grammatical subject denotes the given entity, and if (2) the term denoting the given entity precedes the term denoting the new entity. Accordingly, the second premise is easiest to comprehend with noncanonical word order--that is, with the prepositional object in preverbal position denoting the given entity (e.g., To the right of the given object is the new subject). This finding is explained in terms of contextual licensing of noncanonical word order. Here, we discuss and tested two alternative accounts of contextual licensing, given-new and partially ordered set relations (Poset). The given-new account claims that noncanonical word order is licensed by the term denoting the given entity preceding the term denoting the new entity. On the Poset account, noncanonical word order is licensed if the preverbal constituent introduces a new entity that stands in a transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric relation to a given entity. Comprehension times for second premises with spatial adverbs in four different word orders support both accounts of contextual licensing; Poset licensing was stronger than given-new licensing.