This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embedded-clause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb—that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two story-based comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of wh-fronting in French.
AoshimaS., PhillipsC., & WeinbergA. (2004). Processing filler-gap dependencies in a head-final language. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 23–54.
2.
BaayenR. H., DavidsonD. J., & BatesD. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.
3.
BarrD. J., LevyR., ScheepersC., & TilyH. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.
ChoiY., & TrueswellJ. C. (2010). Children's (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: Evidence for developing control in sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 106, 41–61.
6.
ChristiansonK., HollingworthA., HalliwellJ. F., & FerreiraF. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 368–407.
7.
CrainS., & FodorJ. D. (1985). How can grammars help parsers. In DowtyD. R., KarttunenL., & ZwickyA. M. (Eds.), Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives (pp. 94–128). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8.
De VilliersJ., RoeperT., Bland-StewartL., & PearsonB. (2008). Answering hard questions: Wh-movement across dialects and disorder. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 67–103.
9.
De VilliersJ., RoeperT., & VainikkaA. (1990). The acquisition of long-distance rules. In FrazierL. & De VilliersJ. (Eds.), Language processing and language acquisition (pp. 257–297). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
FerreiraF. (2003). The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 164–203.
12.
FerreiraF., & HendersonJ. M. (1991). Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 725–745.
13.
FerreiraF., & HendersonJ. M. (1998). Syntactic reanalysis, thematic processing, and sentence comprehension. In FodorJ. D. & FerreiraF. (Eds.), Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, Volume 21 (pp. 73–100). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
14.
FerreiraF., & PatsonN. D. (2007). The ‘good enough’ approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 71–83.
15.
FiebachC. J., SchlesewskyM., & FriedericiA. D. (2002). Separating syntactic memory costs and syntactic integration costs during parsing: The processing of German WH-questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 250–272.
16.
FineA. B., JaegerT. F., FarmerT. A., & QianT. (2013). Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension. PLoS ONE, 8(10), 1–18.
17.
FodorJ. D., & InoueA. (1994). The diagnosis and cure of garden paths. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23(5), 407–434.
18.
FodorJ. D., & InoueA. (1998). Attach anyway. In FodorJ. D. & Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing (pp. 101–141). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
19.
FodorJ. D., & InoueA. (2000). Syntactic features in reanalysis: Positive and negative symptoms. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(1), 25–36.
20.
FrazierL., & CliftonC.Jr. (1998). Sentence reanalysis, and visibility. In FodorJ. D. & FerreiraF. (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing (pp. 143–176). Dordrecht: Springer.
21.
FrazierL. & Flores d'ArcaisG. B. F. (1989). Filler driven parsing: A study of gap filling in dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 331–344.
22.
GarnseyS. M., TanenhausM. K., & ChapmanR. M. (1989). Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 51–60.
23.
GerkenL. (2006). Decisions, decisions: Infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition, 98(3), B67–B74.
24.
GibsonE. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68(1), 1–76.
25.
GomezR. L. (2002). Variability and detection of invariant structure. Psychological Science, 13, 431–436.
26.
GordonP. C., HendrickR., & LevineW. H. (2002). Memory-load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science, 13(5), 425–430.
27.
HaleJ. (2003). The information conveyed by words in sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(2), 101–123.
28.
HuangY. T., ZhengX., MengX., & SnedekerJ. (2013). Children's assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(4), 589–606.
29.
HurewitzF., Brown-SchmidtS., ThorpeK., GleitmanL. R., & TrueswellJ. C. (2000). One frog, two frog, red frog, blue frog: Factors affecting children's syntactic choices in production and comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 597–626.
30.
JaegerT. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434–446.
31.
KaschakM. P., & GlenbergA. M. (2004). This construction needs learned. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 133(3), 450–467.
32.
KingJ., & JustM. A. (1991). Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory* 1. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(5), 580–602.
33.
KuznetsovaA., BrockhoffP. B., & ChristensenR. H. B. (2014). lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linearmixed effect models. R Package Version 2.0–11. Retrieved from http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lmerTest.
34.
LassottaR., OmakA., PanizzaD., VillataS., & FranckJ. (2015). Linking cognitive control and syntactic revision of garden-path wh-questions in adults and children. Manuscript in preparation.
35.
LevinB., & Rappaport-HovavM. R. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
36.
LevyR. (2008). A noisy-channel model of rational human sentence comprehension under uncertain input. Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA), 234–243.
37.
LewisR. L. (1998). Reanalysis and limited repair parsing: Leaping off the garden path. In FerreiraF. & FodorJ. D. (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing (pp. 247–286). Dordrecht: Springer.
38.
LoveT. E. (2007). The processing of non-canonically ordered constituents in long distance dependencies by pre-school children: A real-time investigation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 191–206.
39.
Marslen-WilsonW. (1975). Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process. Science, 189, 226–228.
40.
MathieuE. (2004). The mapping of form and interpretation: The case of optional wh-movement in french. Lingua, 114(9–10), 1090–1132.
41.
MayeJ., WerkerJ. F., & GerkenL. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82, B101–B111.
42.
MazukaR., JinchoN., & OishiH. (2009). Development of executive control and language processing. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3, 59–89.
43.
MeroniL., & CrainS. (2003). On not being led down the kindergarten path. In BeachleyB., BrownA., & ConlinF. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th boston university conference on language development (pp. 531–544). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
44.
MyersL. L. (2007). WH-interrogatives in spoken French: A corpus-based analysis of their form and function. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
45.
NovickJ. M., HusseyE., Teubner-RhodesS., HarbisonJ. I., & BuntingM. F. (2013). Clearing the garden-path: Improving sentence processing through cognitive control training. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(2), 186–217.
46.
NovickJ. M., TrueswellJ. C., & Thompson-SchillS. L. (2005). Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of broca's area in sentence comprehension. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 5, 263–281.
47.
NovickJ. M., TrueswellJ. C., & Thompson-SchillS. L. (2010). Broca's area and language processing: Evidence for the cognitive control connection. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4, 906–924.
48.
OiryM. (2010). A case of true optionality: Wh-in-situ patterns like long movement in French. In A. Roussou & C. Vlachos (Eds.), The optionality of wh-Movement. Linguistic Analysis, 37(1–2), 112–136.
49.
OmakiA., Davidson WhiteI., GoroT., LidzJ., & PhillipsC. (2014). No fear of commitment: Children's incremental interpretation in English and Japanese wh questions. Language Learning and Development, 0, 1–28.
50.
OmakiA., & LidzJ. (2015). Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Language Acquisition, 22, 158–192.
51.
OmakiA., & SchulzB. (2011). Filler-gap dependencies and island constraints in second-language sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33, 563–588.
52.
PerlmutterD. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the fourth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 157–189.
53.
PhillipsC., & WagersM. (2007). Relating structure and time in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In GaskellG. (Ed.), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 739–756). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
54.
R Development Core Team. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/
55.
RobertsL., MarinisT., FelserC., & ClahsenH. (2007). Antecedent priming at trace positions in children's sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 175–188.
56.
SaffranJ. R., AslinR. N., & NewportE. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, New Series, 274, 1926–1928.
57.
SchützeC. T., & SprouseJ. (2013). Judgment data. In PodesvaR. J. & SharmaD. (Eds.), Research methods in linguistics (pp. 27–50). Cambridge: Cambride University Press.
58.
SlatteryT. J., SturtP., ChristiansonK., YoshidaM., & FerreiraF. (2013). Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(2), 104–120.
59.
SnedekerJ. (2013). Children's sentence processing. In van GompelR. P. G. (Ed.), Sentence processing (pp. 189–220). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
60.
StaubA. (2007). The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57(2), 299–323.
61.
StoweA. (1986). Parsing wh-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 227–245.
SussmanR. S., & SedivyJ. (2003). The time-course of processing syntactic dependencies: Evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(2), 143–163.
64.
TaborW., GalantucciB., & RichardsonD. (2004). Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 50(4), 355–370.
65.
TanenhausK., Spivey-KnowltonJ., EberhardM., & SedivyC. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632–1634.
66.
ThompsonS. P., & NewportE. L. (2007). Statistical learning of syntax: The role of transitional probability. Language Learning and Development, 3(1), 1–42.
67.
TraxlerM. J., & PickeringM. J. (1996). Plausibility and the processing of unbounded dependencies: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 454–475.
68.
TrueswellJ. C., & GleitmanL. R. (2007). Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition. In Gaskell (Ed.), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 635–656). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
69.
TrueswellJ. C., SekerinaI., HillN. M., & LogripM. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134.
70.
UnsworthS. (2013). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 86–110.
71.
Van DykeJ. A., & McElreeB. (2006). Retrieval interference in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 55(2), 157–166.
72.
van GompelR. P. G., PickeringM. J., PearsonJ., & JacobG. (2006). The activation of inappropriate analyses in garden-path sentences: Evidence from structural priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 55(3), 335–362.
73.
WagersM. W., & PhillipsC. (2014). Going the distance: Memory and control processes in active dependency construction. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(7), 1274–1304.
74.
WeighallA. R. (2008). The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99, 75–95.
75.
XiangM., DillonB., WagersM., LiuF. Q., & GuoT. M. (2014). Processing covert dependencies: An SAT study on Mandarin wh-in-situ questions. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 23, 207–232.
