Interaction between topic marking and subject preference strategy in sign language processing

ABSTRACT

The preference of the human parser for interpreting syntactically ambiguous sentence-initial arguments as the subject of a clause (i.e. subject preference) has been documented for spoken and sign languages. Recent research (He, 2016) suggests that the subject preference can be eliminated by manipulating information structure (topicalisation). To investigate the effects of interaction between syntax and information structure on language processing, we tested the role of topic marking in sentence processing in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS). We examined whether non-manual topic marking on the sentence-initial argument eliminates the subject preference using event-related brain potentials. We replicated the finding of the subject preference in ÖGS by identifying an N400-family response to object-first sentences. Further, topic marking in ÖGS influenced the processing of the topic argument itself and later processing stages. This suggests that interpretation of topic marking imposes additional processing costs, relative to syntactic reanalysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-manual markings
• subject preference
• Austrian Sign Language
• sign language processing
• topic marking

Acknowledgements

We want to thank all Deaf informants taking part in the present study. Special thanks to Waltraud Unterasinger for signing the stimulus material. Additionally, we are grateful to Vadim Kimmelman for his helpful comments when reviewing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Evie Malaia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4700-0257

Ronnie B. Wilbur http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7081-9351

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In Wang (2011) the structures were disambiguated by animacy restrictions on the verb following the ambiguous argument. In He (2016), the verb after the ambiguous argument disambiguated the structures either through animacy or world knowledge.

2 There is general agreement that this process is a linguistic (grammatically controlled) process in sign languages (for a discussion see e.g. Lillo-Martin & Meier, 2011).

3 Other verb types include so-called “backwards verbs” (reverse path) and “spatial verbs” which take locative arguments instead of individuals. Recent analyses argue that these should not be considered irregular (Bos, 2016, 2017). They are not relevant to further discussion here.

4 At the moment there is no evidence of any form of case-marking on the arguments or of a default referencing (i.e. for example if subjects were always referenced at the ipsi- or contralateral side of the signer) in ÖGS.

5 Per convention Deaf with upper-case D refers to deaf or hard of hearing humans who define themselves as members of the sign language community. In contrast, deaf refers to audiological status.

6 Signers also show enhanced abilities of human motion/action processing (Corina et al., 2007; Corina & Grosvald, 2012).

7 In ASL the duration of signs may mark the phrase position of a particular sign, i.e. signs in phrase final position are lengthened (phrase final lengthening; e.g. Liddell, 1978; Wilbur & Malaia, 2018; Wilbur & Nolen, 1986).

8 Note that Aarons (1994, 1996) described additional non-manuals that may occur with tm1, tm2 and tm3.

9 Aarons (1994, 1996) pointed out that in ASL two topics can co-occur within one sentence, but they have to belong to different categories. If one of them is a moved topic (marked by tm1), it must appear after the other topic, i.e. in second position and thus adjacent to CP.

10 The definition Wilbur (2012) used for left dislocation is from McCawley (1988). The rest of the terminology is also based on previous works (e.g. Prince, 1984; Ziv, 1994).

11 Notation conventions: Signs are glossed with capital letters; IX = manual index sign; Subscripts indicate reference points within signing space; non-manual markings and the scope of non-manual markings are indicated by a line above the glosses; t at the end of the line stands for topic marking; the comma after the topic indicates the prosodic break, i.e. the pause after the topic. The notation conventions Aarons (1996) originally used were slightly adapted in this text.

12 Further, the background color as well as the light conditions in the video material were kept constant across conditions.

13 Mean time points are given in seconds; standard deviations are presented in parentheses.

14 Coded in R as lmer(Rating ∼ ORDER*TOPIC + (1 |Subject) + (1 |Item)).

15 Coded in R as lmer(log(Reaction time + 1) ∼ ORDER*TOPIC + (1 |Subject) + (1|Item)).

16 Although topic constructions, i.e. structures in which the sentence-initial argument bears a specific NMM and is prosodically set apart from the rest of the clause by a pause, have also been described for ÖGS (Hausch, 2008; Ni, 2014), there is – to the best of our knowledge – no study so far focusing on the question of whether (some of) these topic constructions involve syntactic movement. Given that ÖGS has a general basic word order of SOV, determining syntactic movement is also not straightforward. Therefore, it is an open question whether the non-manual topic marking used in the present study involves syntactic movement or not. Nonetheless, there is clear agreement on what the topic marking should look like, and we have used that in our study.

17 Original notation in Aarons (1996) was adapted for the present paper.