This thesis addresses the cognitive basis of syntactic adaptation, which biases speakers to repeat their own syntactic constructions and those of their conversational partners. I address two types of syntactic adaptation: short-term priming and longterm adaptation. I develop two metrics for syntactic adaptation within a speaker and between speakers in dialogue: one for short-term priming effects that decay quickly, and one for long-term adaptation over the course of a dialogue. Both methods estimate adaptation in large datasets consisting of transcribed human-human dialogue annotated with syntactic information. Two such corpora in English are used: Switchboard, a collection of spontaneous phone conversation, and HCRC Map Task, a set of task-oriented dialogues in which participants describe routes on a map to one another. I find both priming and long-term adaptation in both corpora, confirming well-known experimental results (e.g., Bock, 1986b). I extend prior work by showing that syntactic priming effects not only apply to selected syntactic constructions that are alternative realizations of the same semantics, but still hold when a broad

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven more elusive, fueling claims that comprehension is less dependent on general syntactic representations and more dependent on lexical knowledge. In three experiments we explored syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension. Participants acted out double-object (DO) or prepositional-object (PO) dative sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Prime sentences used different verbs and nouns than the target sentences. In target sentences, the onset of the direct-object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (DO e.g., Show the horse the book; PO e.g., Show the horn to the dog). We measured the difference in looks to the potential recipient and the potential theme during the ambiguous interval. In all experiments, participants who heard DO primes showed a greater preference for the recipient over the theme than those who heard PO primes, demonstrating across-verb priming during online language comprehension. These results accord with priming found in production studies, indicating a role for abstract structural information during comprehension as well as production.

Abstract not found

This study asked whether new linguistic patterns acquired through recent perception experience can transfer to speech production. Participants heard and spoke sequences of syllables featuring novel phonotactic constraints (e.g. /f / is always a syllable onset, /s / is always a syllable coda). Participants ’ speech errors reflected weaker learning of the constraints present in the spoken sequences (e.g. /f / must be onset) when they heard sequences with the inverse constraints (e.g. /f / must be coda), suggesting that the constraints experienced in perception interfered with learning in production. The results did not depend on the presence of a shared orthographic code in perception and production trials, suggesting that direct transfer between heard speech and produced speech is possible, perhaps through prediction via inner speech. Further work is needed to determine the exact mechanism supporting inter-modality transfer of phonological generalizations.

The problem Theories of syntax acquisition are rarely tested against typologically different languages, because there is no uniform way to evaluate syntactic knowledge in different languages. It is hard to evaluate computational systems with child utterances, because there is no agreement about the nature of syntax in development. We provide a new evaluation measure that can work equally well in typologically different languages and for both adult and child utterances. We use this measure to compare unsupervised computational algorithms for category induction. A new evaluation measure • Syntactic constituency and hierarchical structure can be inferred from the order of words. • A system that can predict the order of words in utterances can be said to have knowledge that is equivalent to the syntactic knowledge that is said to generate that sentence. • Our evaluation measure (called Word Order Prediction Accuracy, or WOPA) will be the percentage of sentences in a corpus where the order of words can be predicted by a syntactic learner. A Production-oriented Evaluation Measure • In production, the speaker already know the concepts that they want to convey. The concepts can activate the words that they will be using. So the role of syntax in production is to insure that the words are ordered in a grammatical way. • In our task, the learner is given the words from the utterance that we want to predict in an unordered list (called here the candidate set), and the system must generate the actual word order that the person used. Unsupervised evaluation of syntax acquisition algorithms in 12 typologically different languages

object scrambling, unaccusative verbs Address for correspondence:

Following its introduction by Sapir (1933), the term “psychological reality ” has provoked intense reactions from within linguistics as well its neighboring disciplines. Discussions have been particularly heated since the rise of generative grammar, whose proponents made quite strong claims regarding the relationship of theoretical concepts from linguistics to the internal cognitive mechanisms underlying the acquisition and processing of sound patterns. For example, The Sound Pattern of English is asserted to be “a hypothesis concerning the actual internalized grammar of the speaker-hearer ” where grammar refers to “a system which is used in the production and interpretation of utterances (Chomsky and Halle, 1968: 4). ” Although this perspective is by no means universally adopted by phonologists, its dominance in linguistics since the mid-20 th century reflects a major conceptual shift from previous perspectives on the study of language. As noted by Anderson (1985:6; emphasis in original): “Traditionally, linguists have assumed that their concern was the study of languages, taken as (potentially unlimited) sets of possible sentences (or utterances, etc.) forming unitary and coherent systems. Gradually, however, the emphasis in research has shifted…to the properties of grammars, in the sense of

This paper presents recent research which provides an over-arching model of exemplar theory capable of explaining phenomena across the phonetic and syntactic strata. The model represents a unique exemplar-based account of constituency interactions encompassing both linguistic domains. It yields simulation and experimental results in keeping with experimental findings in the literature on syllable duration variability and offers an exemplar-theoretic account of local grammaticality. In addition, it provides some insights into the nature of exemplar cloud formation, and demonstrates experimentally the potential gains that can be enjoyed via the use of rich exemplar representations. Exemplar Theory was initially proposed in the domain of psychology (Nosofsky, 1986; Hintzman, 1986). However, recent years have seen a growing body of research into exemplar-based

This paper tests the hypothesis that language comprehenders update their beliefs about the statistics of their language throughout the lifespan, and that this belief update allows comprehenders to combine probabilistic linguistic cues according to their reliability. We conduct a multi-day sentence comprehension study in which the reliability of a probabilistic cue to syntactic structure is manipulated between subjects. We find that as the reliability of one cue to syntactic structure decreases, comprehenders come to rely more on a second cue to syntactic structure. The results are consonant with rational models of cue integration in speech perception and in nonlinguistic domains, thus suggesting a unifying computational principle governing the way humans use information across both perceptual and higher-level cognitive tasks.

Structural priming, the tendency for speakers to reuse the structures of recent utterances (Bock, 1986) or to produce repeated structures more fluently, is well documented for structural selection, but less so for phrase structure generation. Priming of structural choices is long-lived, persisting across intervening utterances (Bock & Griffin, 2000), but priming of phrase structure does not survive even one intervening sentence (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003), suggesting that the processes may be different. Moreover, although Smith & Wheeldon (2001) found an initiation latency benefit of initial noun phrase priming, the main verb (move/s) was also constant. Here, we report a noun phrase structure repetition effect only when the entire verb phrase was also repeated. Because this effect is better accounted for as plan reconfiguration than as structural priming, previous reports of phrase level structural priming need to be reassessed.