Finding identity in the midst of ambiguity: case and number disambiguation in Basque

ABSTRACT

Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation of number- and case-ambiguous nouns in Basque. In a noun phrase comprehension paradigm, ambiguous noun number judgments were biased by preceding modifier number. Then, using a preamble completion paradigm, we examined whether headnoun disambiguation and thus sentence completion was also biased by modifier number. Our results suggest that nonrestrictive information (singular and plural number) can affect disambiguation. We also report task differences in the overall interpretation of ambiguous Basque nouns, as well modifier-induced agreement errors. We suggest that the parser uses any available context information when there is ambiguity, including preceding modifier markings.

KEYWORDS:

• Subject-verb agreement
• morphological ambiguity
• Basque
• number and case attraction
• disambiguation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Eneko Antón, Amets Esnal, Andrea Ganchegui, Itzal Uranga, Ian Rion and Manex Lete for their help with stimuli creation, recording and transcription. This research was partially funded by the following grants: PRE_2015_1_0320, PRE_2016_2_0070, PRE_2017_2_0079, PRE_2018_2_0074 (B.R.), as well as PI_2016_1_0014 (N.M.) by Eusko Jaurlaritza, PSI2015-65694-P and RTI2018-096311-B-I00 (N.M), as well as RYC-2017-22015 and FFI2016-76432-P_LAMPT (S.M.), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), the Gipuzkoa Fellowship Program (S.M), as well as the Agencia Estatal de Investigación through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This was confirmed by the current experiment, with only 1.6% of the total absolutive use involving objects in Experiment 2.

2 In Basque, the uninflected article-less form of the noun is used in this construction (i.e. mutil), which conveniently excludes the possibility of the question biasing the answer.

3 Adding the frequency of the genitive form (plural/singular) or the NP rating score did not improve model fit, nor did it result in any significant effects.

4 To check for a possible effect of Transcriber (the native speaker who transcribed the answers) on our effect of interest, we fitted a model that contained a Condition X Transcriber interaction. The maximally converging model included Condition X Transcriber interaction as a fixed effect, by-participant and by-item random intercept and by-item random slope. There was no interaction between Condition and Transcriber (z < 0.70, p > 0.40). Also, adding this variable did not result in a better model fit.

5 Adding the frequency of the genitive form (plural/singular), the NP rating score, or the language dominance of the participants did not improve model fit, nor did it result in any significant effects.

6 We thank an anonymous reviewer for these observations.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the following grants: PRE_2015_1_0320, PRE_2016_2_0070, PRE_2017_2_0079, PRE_2018_2_0074 (B.R.), as well as PI_2016_1_0014 (N.M.) by Eusko Jaurlaritza, PSI2015-65694-P and RTI2018-096311-B-I00 (N.M), as well as RYC-2017-22015 and FFI2016-76432-P_LAMPT (S.M.), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), as well as the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa grant SEV-2015-0490.