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Abstract:
Anticipating upcoming referents on the basis of discourse
status
Comprehension studies of scrambling languages find
that noncanonical sentences induce more difficulty than canonical
sentences, with this difference being attributed to the
structural complexity/infrequency of noncanonical forms (e.g.,
[1]). However, by presenting sentences in isolation,
existing studies implicitly ignore that word order variation is
largely guided by discourse factors. E.g., in Finnish, an
articleless flexible-word-order language with canonical SVO
order, word order encodes given/new distinctions: OVS
specifically marks the object as old and the subject as new; SVO
is more flexible, being used when the subject is old and the
object new, and when both are old or, discourse-initially, when
both are new.
If the general framework of referential theories
(e.g., [2]) is correct, the observed dispreference for
noncanonical orders may arise from the additional presuppositions
needed to understand them out of context. Indeed, our prior
work, involving self-paced reading in Finnish, showed that
processing difficulty associated with OVS is greatly mitigated by
discourses that establish appropriate given/new
distinctions.
Reading studies, however, cannot easily reveal the
on-line referential processes that we propose are involved in
SVO/OVS comprehension. Given the description above, the
Finnish OV... configuration predicts that a postverbal
constituent will be new information, whereas SV... order makes no
such prediction. In the current study, we examined whether
Finnish listeners (N=16) can use this information on-line to
predict referents of upcoming constituents.
Methods. Eye-movements were recorded as
participants heard stories and viewed pictures. Target
trials contained a picture with three characters (e.g., a man and
a woman by a tree, and another woman elsewhere in the
scene). Prior to hearing the critical sentence, only two of
the characters had been introduced (man and woman by tree),
leaving the other character discourse-new. Participants
then heard either an SVO (man-subject.greeted.woman-object) or
OVS (man-object.greeted.woman-subject) sentence. These
'ambiguous-referent' conditions were compared with
'unambiguous-referents' (man-subject.greeted.child-object), where
the discourse-new woman was replaced in the picture by a
child. In both cases, OV... should encourage anticipatory
looks to the discourse-new referent. And, in
ambiguous-referent conditions, SVO should prompt little
consideration of the new-woman as the referent of the second
noun, as compared to OVS.
Results. The predictions were borne
out. As compared to SVO, OVS sentences showed anticipatory
eye-movements to the discourse-new referent (other woman/child)
at the second-noun onset, before participants had enough phonetic
information to recognize this word (F=9.25, p<.05).
Listeners in the SVO-unambiguous-referent condition didn't look
to the new referent until well after the word-onset.
SVO-ambiguous-referent showed few looks to the discourse-new
referent: listeners assumed 'woman' referred to the
previously-mentioned woman. In contrast,
OVS-ambiguous-referent showed substantial looks to the
discourse-new woman, but also later competition with the
discourse-old woman, due to the ambiguous lexical cue.
Off-line referential judgments matched these patterns.
Thus, comprehenders use discourse-status, encoded
in object-verb order, to predict that the upcoming postverbal
subject is a new, previously-unmentioned entity. Just as
Altmann & Kamide's results [3] show anticipation based upon
semantic restrictions, our findings illustrate that anticipation
also arises on the basis of discourse-status information, as
encoded by word order, even when this order is structurally
complex.
Example
(English translation and gloss)
In the park, near a tree, are standing a man and a
woman, while some birds are flying overhead ...
Then man-subject greets woman-object...
(SVO-ambiguous-referents)
Then man-object greets woman-subject ...
(OVS-ambiguous-referents)
Then man-subject greets child-object ...
(SVO-unambiguous-referents)
Then man-object greets child-subject ...
(OVS-unambiguous-referents)
References
[1] Hyona & Hujanen (1997). Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 50A, 841-858.
[2] Altmann & Steedman (1988).
Cognition, 30, 191-238.
[3] Altmann & Kamide (2000). Cognition,
73, 247-264.
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