Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

ABSTRACT

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by “correcting” syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.

KEYWORDS:

• Language comprehension
• sentence processing
• structural priming
• missing verbs

Acknowledgements

We thank Alissa Melinger, Gary Oppenheim, and Florian Jaeger for helpful discussions and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The focus of this study is the possible reconstruction, in the absence of a verb, of abstract syntactic representations which are independent of modality (spoken or written). We thus cite, throughout, evidence from the comprehension of both written and spoken sentences.

2. As part of this process, comprehenders might construct an anomalous constituent structure representation such as S[NP NP PP] or S[NP VP[NP PP]], or they might simply draw on the structure of the phrasal constituents (NP NP PP) without combining them into a sentential representation. Importantly, none of these possible representations corresponds to the representation of a grammatical sentence such as S[NP VP [V NP PP]].

3. The interaction between Prime Verb and Prime Construction was removed from the items random slopes because of singular convergence of the full model (see Appendix 3).

4. The interaction between Prime Verb and Prime Construction was removed from the items random slopes because of singular convergence of the full model (see Appendix 3).

5. In additional analyses, we divided the data from each experiment into four parts and compared priming in the No Verb condition in the first vs. the fourth part combining the data from the two experiments; priming remained unchanged across parts [estimate = −0.32, SE  = 0.68, z = −0.47, p = .64]. This result rules out the possibility that priming from missing-verb sentences was due to cumulative structural priming from well-formed sentences.

6. We thank Florian Jaeger for suggesting this possibility.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge Spanish Government grants PSI 2008-01191/PSIC and Consolider Ingenio-2010 CE-CSD2007-00121, and pre-doctoral scholarship FPU-AP2005-4496 (II); Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant RES-062-23-0376; a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (HPB); and National Institutes of Health R01 grants HD050287, HD051030, and DC011492.