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C Clifton

Publications and source records attributed to C Clifton.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Sentence and text comprehension: roles of linguistic structure.

Readers and listeners use linguistic structure in comprehending sentences and texts. We review research, mostly published in the past five years, that addresses the question of how they use it. We consider effects of syntactic, lexical, prosodic, morphological, semantic, and discourse structure, as well as reviewing research on how discourse context and frequency of experience, the contents of long-term memory, and the mental models being constructed by a reader or listener affect sentence and text comprehension. We point out areas of theoretical debate including depth-first versus breadth-first models of parsing and memory-based versus constructionist models of discourse comprehension, attempt to show how the empirical effects we review bear on such theoretical questions, and discuss how new lines of research, including research on languages other than English, may enrich the discussion of these questions.

Cognition↗
PubMed2000

On bound variable interpretations: the LF-only hypothesis.

Under what conditions do perceivers prefer to assign a bound variable interpretation to a pronominal that is ambiguous between a bound variable and a coreferential interpretation? Several experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that language perceivers prefer a bound variable over a coreferential interpretation of a pronoun because the former only requires consultation of a logical form (LF) representation, while the latter requires access to a discourse representation. The hypothesis was disconfirmed in two respects. First, although bound variable interpretations show a processing advantage over coreferential interpretations in VP ellipsis constructions, the preference for bound variable interpretations is not general--it does not extend to other quantificational contexts. Second, the preference for bound variable interpretations in VP ellipsis constructions is not limited to examples in which the antecedent and the ellipsis site occur in the same sentence. If the bound variable advantage were due to the ready availability of the LF for the current sentence, the advantage should disappear across sentence boundaries. An alternative hypothesis is then considered which could explain the source of the bound variable advantage in VP ellipsis contexts.

Humans↗
PubMed2000

Processing coordinate structures.

Coordination often involves syntactically like categories. Based on the results of four reading time studies, it is argued here that the syntactic like-category restriction is not grammatical. Coordination of unlike categories can be just as acceptable as coordination of like categories. However, syntactically like category coordination is processed faster than coordination of unlike categories even when the two sentence types are judged to be fully acceptable. Further, parallelism of conjuncts facilitates processing regardless of whether it is parallelism in the category of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar might regulate) or parallelism in the internal structure of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar does not regulate, on anyone's view). Parallelism did not facilitate processing when the structure of a subject and object were manipulated, implying that parallelism effects are largely limited to the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and not due simply to the repetition of a phrase with a particular shape.

Cognition↗
PubMed2000

The role of salience in conceptual combination.

The present study investigated three factors that affect the interpretation of novel noun-noun (N-N) combinations: simple feature salience, ontological category, and assessed similarity. Participants read and defined a series of novel N-N combinations in which the feature salience of N1 and N2 was manipulated. Participants also rated the combinations for similarity. The combinations were constrained to be within ontological category. All interpretations were scored in terms of the strategies (property mapping vs. relation linking) used to produce the given interpretations. Highly salient features drove property-mapping interpretations based on those features. Natural kinds produced more property-mapping interpretations than did artifacts. There was no correlation between the proportion of property-mapping interpretations and the assessed similarity of the N-N combinations. These results are discussed as an extension of Estes and Glucksberg's (2000) interactive theory of conceptual combination and argue for the importance of feature salience as a factor in conceptual combination.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Another word on parsing relative clauses: eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English.

Ambiguity as to what the relative clause modifies in phrases such as Someone shot the maid of the actress who was divorced/Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba divorciada tends to be resolved differently in different languages (and in different forms of complex noun phrases). In English, there is a weak but seldom significant tendency for the relative clause to be taken as modifying the second noun phrase, the actress, but in Spanish, several researchers have found a significant preference for the relative clause's modifying the first noun phrase, la criada. The present experiments compare Spanish and English readers' eye movements while reading exactly comparable sentences in their native languages and find a significant reading time advantage in Spanish when it is forced to modify the first noun phrase, but in English when the relative clause is forced to modify the second noun phrase. Theoretical implications of the findings for previous explanations of the phenomenon are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Accessing singular antecedents in conjoined phrases.

Two experiments examined processing of singular pronouns when the antecedent (e.g., Mary) was a noun phrase (NP) in a conjoined phrase (e.g., Mary and John). Whole-sentence reading times showed an increase in processing time associated with splitting the conjoined phrase to access a single NP antecedent. The increase in processing occurred both when the antecedent was in the subject position and when it was in a nonsubject position. The source of the disruption was further investigated using eyetracking methods. Summing over regions of the text, the magnitude of the processing cost incurred by having to split a conjoined NP was closely comparable when there was and when there was not a gender-appropriate distracting potential antecedent. When there was no such potential antecedent, the increase in processing time occurred immediately in the pronoun region when eye movements were measured. In contrast, when there was a second discourse entity that matched the gender and number of the pronoun (but was not a plausible antecedent for the pronoun), eyetracking measures suggested that the processing difficulty was delayed until additional information was read that forced the antecedent to be one of the conjoined NPs. The results are interpreted in terms of Sanford and Garrod's (1981) scenario-based model of text comprehension.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Plausibility and argument structure in sentence comprehension.

In two experiments, we investigated how reading time was affected by the plausibility of the prepositional phrase in subject-verb-noun-phrase-prepositional-phrase sentences, and the status of the prepositional phrase as argument versus adjunct of the verb. Highly plausible prepositional phrases were read faster than less plausible ones, and argument prepositional phrases were read faster than adjuncts. These effects appeared both in a self-paced reading experiment and in an experiment that measured eye movements during normal reading. The effects of plausibility were substantially larger and longer lasting than the effects of argument status, but both appeared very early in the reading of the prepositional phrase. The implications of these effects for models of parsing and sentence interpretation are discussed.

Cognition↗
PubMed1997

Construal: overview, motivation, and some new evidence.

Is there underspecification in the syntactic phrase marker constructed during on-line sentence analysis? According to the construal hypothesis (Frazier & Clifton, 1996), a very limited amount and type of structural underspecification is available to the human sentence parsing mechanism. Here we present the basic definitions of construal, illustrating the theory with some already published evidence. We also discuss several new pieces of evidence, from our laboratory and elsewhere, that support the construal hypothesis. We end by raising the question of what kind of mechanism operates in the process of interpreting a nonprimary phrase (a phrase that receives an underspecified syntactic analysis), and conclude that it is not a process of competition between multiple activated possible analyses but instead is a process in which the sheer existence of ambiguity need not result in increased processing cost.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs.

Three questionnaire studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs) such as "I really liked the preface of the book that I read yesterday." These complex NPs are ambiguous between two readings, one in which the relative clause (RC) that I read yesterday modifies the first noun, N1, preface, or the second noun, N2, book. Cuetos and Mitchell (Cognition, 1988, 30, 73-105) claimed that Spanish was biased toward having the RC modify N1, which they claimed was evidence against the cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. We demonstrate that the preference for N1 versus N2 modification varies greatly between different construction types within both Spanish and English while the variation between languages is relatively minor, but still of interest. The effect cannot be reduced to an effect of plausibility, but seems to reflect directly certain syntactic and semantic aspects of the constructions studied. We claim that relative clauses and other "nonprimary" phrases are not parsed following such parsing principles as late closure, but instead follow principles we advance in the form of the construal hypothesis. Thus, it is not the case that late closure is a language-specific strategy; rather, it and similar structural parsing principles are specific to only certain classes of phrases within a language.

Language↗
PubMed1995

Determinants of parafoveal preview benefit in high and low working memory capacity readers: implications for eye movement control.

The experiment in this article extended studies by A. W. Inhoff and K. Rayner (1986) and J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira (1990) to determine how the printed frequency of two adjacent words influenced the benefit of having parafoveal preview of the 2nd word. High- and low-span participants (assessed by M. Daneman and P. A. Carpenter's, 1980, Reading Span Test) were tested to determine whether working memory capacity influenced parafoveal preview benefit. Parafoveal preview benefit was determined by an interaction of both words' frequencies in first fixation and by the 2nd word's frequency in gaze duration. However, readers were generally fixated closer to the beginning of the 2nd word when the 1st word was low frequency. When the viewing distance confound was minimized, the prior word's frequency did affect parafoveal preview benefit. Parafoveal preview benefit did not vary between reading groups. Group distributions of fixation duration provided no evidence for J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira's fixation cutoff model.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Thematic roles in sentence parsing.

Two eyetracking experiments examined the reading of sentences like "While the police/truck stopped the Datsun disappeared into the night." A paper by L. Stowe (Thematic structures and sentence comprehension. In G. N. Carlson and M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing, 1989) indicated that an inanimate subject ("truck" in "After the truck stopped the Datsun disappeared ...") is taken as theme of the ergative verb ("stop"), preventing the assignment of the postverbal noun phrase ("the Datsun") as direct object. This eliminates the disruption of reading that is normally observed on the disambiguating verb ("disappear"). The present experiments found the pattern of results reported by Stowe when looking at the disambiguating region of a sentence. However, the results for earlier regions suggest that the postverbal noun phrase was initially taken as direct object of an ergative verb even when the subject was inanimate. It appears that the inanimacy of the subject may not have guided the initial syntactic analysis, but rather facilitated the revision of an initial misanalysis.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

On the conditions necessary for obtaining argument structure complexity effects.

Schmauder (1991), studying eye movements during reading, cross-modal naming, and cross-modal lexical decision (CMLD) tasks, failed to find evidence of verb argument structure complexity as Shapiro, Zurif, and Grimshaw (1987) had reported for the CMLD task. Shapiro, Brookins, Gordon, and Nagel (1991) suggested that Schmauder did not detect the effect in the CMLD task because the monosyllabic secondary lexical decision (LD) probes she used did not produce enough processing load to detect an effect of argument structure complexity. The present experiment compared the LD probes used by Schmauder with the LD probes used by Shapiro et al. (1987) and failed to find any evidence for the argument structure complexity effect for either type of probe.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed1987

Interactive use of lexical information in speech perception.

Two experiments are reported that demonstrate contextual effects on identification of speech voicing continua. Experiment 1 demonstrated the influence of lexical knowledge on identification of ambiguous tokens from word-nonword and nonword-word continua. Reaction times for word and non-word responses showed a word advantage only for ambiguous stimulus tokens (at the category boundary); no word advantage was found for clear stimuli (at the continua endpoints). Experiment 2 demonstrated an effect of a postperceptual variable, monetary payoff, on nonword-nonword continua. Identification responses were influenced by monetary payoff, but reaction times for bias-consistent and bias-inconsistent responses did not differ at the category boundary. An advantage for bias-consistent responses was evident at the continua endpoints. The contrasting patterns of reaction-time data in the two experiments indicate different underlying mechanisms. We argue that the lexical status effect is attributable to a mechanism in which lexical knowledge directly influences perceptual processes.

Humans↗
PubMed1987

Effects of lexical stress on phonetic categorization.

Three experiments investigated the use of lexical stress in auditory word recognition. Speech voicing continua were created in which lexical status resulted in one end-point constituting a real word and the other end a nonword (e.g. diGRESS-tiGRESS, in which digress is a real word, and DIgress-Tigress, in which tigress is a real word). Subjects' identification of the initial segment of these items was biased in the midrange of the continua in that they were more likely to report a segment that resulted in a real word than one that resulted in a nonword. Alternative acoustically based explanations are discounted in favor of a lexically based account of the data. Possible mechanisms underlying the effect of lexical stress on speech perception are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1986

The use of syntactic information in filling gaps.

Two sentence-comprehension time experiments replicated and extended previously reported research indicating that readers initially make a quick, heuristic assignment of fillers to gaps in temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "Who did John beg to sing?" and "Who did John beg to sing for?" The Most Recent Filler heuristic readers seemed to adopt made the former "distant filler" sentence harder to comprehend than the latter "recent filler" sentence. Readers did not in general use all available sources of information in making this assignment. In particular, they usually delayed their use of verb control information so that substituting the unambiguous-control verbs "force" or "begin" for "beg" did not eliminate the distant filler inferiority. The experiments counter some criticisms that have been made of the previously reported research. The possibility that readers delay using an interesting natural category of information was raised, and its implications for the mental grammar were considered.

Humans↗
PubMed1983

Latency of sequential eye movements: implications for reading.

The best available estimates indicate that the average minimum latency of saccadic eye movements (175-200 msec) approaches the mean duration of fixations in reading (200-250 msec). This fact presents a problem for models of reading which assume that an eye movement is initiated only after substantial information is processed on a fixation. Three experiments are reported that support earlier estimates of saccadic latency; the experiments were conducted under conditions in which the length of measured latencies could not reflect a motoric refractory period, spatial uncertainty, or temporal uncertainty.

Eye Movements↗