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A universal parser or language specific parsing strategies: A study on relative clause attachment preference in Turkish

Year 2019, RumeliDE 2019.Ö6 - Bandırma Onyedi Eylül Üniversitesi Uluslararası Filoloji Çalışmaları Konferansı, 1 - 21, 21.11.2019
https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.648403

Abstract

This study investigated syntactic priming of
relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in monolingual Turkish speakers
through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RC attachment
preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universal
principles but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth
their assumptions about the universality of the parser and the underlying
mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and the sources of information used
in sentence processing.  However, there
is not one single model, the predictions of which could account for all the
contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studies using different
materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC
attachment preferences further in detail, we conducted two offline
(pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (self-paced reading) task. The results
showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachment preferences on
condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RC
attachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic
associations of the host NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task
requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), and techniques (e.g. offline or
online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic priming
showed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical
configuration of the alternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the
results suggested that a tendency towards NP1 attachment preference might be
attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimize cognitive
demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs.
passive), task requirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or
directed attention vs. implicit processing).

References

  • Abdelghany, H. (2010). Prosodic phrasing and modifier attachment in Standard Arabic sentence processing. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). City University of New York, NY. Arabmofrad, A., &Marefat, H. (2008). Relative clause attachment ambiguity resolution in Persian. Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), 11(1), 29-48. Aydın, Ö. (2007). The comprehension of Turkish relative clauses in second language acquisition and agrammatism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 295-315. Bahadır, G. (2012). Structural priming in Turkish genitive-possessive constructions. (Doctoral dissertation). Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Başer, Z. (2018). Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387. Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., Liversedge, S. P., Stewart, A. J., & Urbach, T. P. (1995). Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental representation of language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24(6), 489-506. Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D.C. (1996). Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A (3), 664-695. Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. Jr. (1999). Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eye-tracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory & Cognition, 27 (5), 826-833. Carreiras, M., Salillas, E., & Barber, H. (2004). Event-related potentials elicited during parsing of ambiguous relative clauses in Spanish. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 98-105. Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the late closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30(1), 73-105. Desmet, T. & Declercq, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 610-632. De Vincenzi, M., & Job, R. (1993). Some observations on the universality of the late-closure strategy. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22(2), 189-206. Dinçtopal, N. (2007). Syntactic processing in second language acquisition of English. (Unpublished master's thesis). Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Dinçtopal-Deniz, N. (2010). Relative clause attachment preferences of Turkish L2 speakers of English Shallow parsing in the L2? In B. VanPatten& J. Jegerski (Eds.), Research on second language processing and parsing (pp. 27-63). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ehrlich, K., Fernández, E., Fodor, J. D., Stenshoel, E., &Vinereanu, M. (1999). Low attachment of relative clauses: New data from Swedish, Norwegian, and Romanian. Poster presented at the 12th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York. Fernández, E.M. (2000). Bilingual sentence processing: Relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). CUNY Graduate Center, NY. Fernández, E. M. (2003). Bilingual Sentence Processing: Relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ferreira, F. (1991). Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation times for prepared utterances. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 210-233. Fodor, J. D. (1998). Learning to parse? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(2), 285-319. Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (1996). Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frazier, L., &Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291-325. Gertken, S.E.M. (2013). Priming of relative clause attachment during comprehension in French as a first and second language. (Doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Austin. Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzalez, E., &Hickock, G. (1996). Recency preferences in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition, 59, 23-59. Gilboy, E., Sopena, J., Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1995). Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs. Cognition, 54,131-167. Göksel, A., &Kerslake, C. (2005). Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. Göksel, A., &Kerslake, C. (2011). Turkish, an essential grammar. London: Routledge. Hartsuiker, R. J., &Westenberg, C. (2000). Word order priming in written and spoken sentence production. Cognition, 75 (2),27-39. Hemforth, B., Konieczyn, L., Scheepers, C., &Strube, G. (1998). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in German. In D. Hillert (Ed.), Sentence processing: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 293-312). San Diego: Academic Press. Hemfort, B., Fernández, S., Clifton, C., Frazier, L., Konieczyn, L., & Walter, M. (2015). Relative clause attachment in German, English, Spanish and French: Effects of position and length. Lingua, 166, 43-64. Kamide, Y., & Mitchell, D. C. (1997). Relative clause attachment: Nondeterminism in Japanese parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(2), 247-254. Kırkıcı, B. (2004). The processing of relative clause attachment ambiguities in Turkish. Turkic Languages, 8, 111-121. Kirk, R. E. (2009). Experimental design. In R.E. Millsap & A. Maydeu-Olivares (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of quantitative methods in psychology (23-45). New Delhi, India: SAGE. Lee, D., &Kweon, S. (2004). A sentence processing study of relative clause in Korean with two attachment sites. Discourse and Cognition, 11, 126-141. Lovrić, N. (2003). Implicit prosody in silent reading: Relative clause attachment in Croatian.(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). CUNY Graduate Center, NY. Maia, M., Fernández, E. M., Costa, A., &Lourenço-Gomes, M. (2007). Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 5(6), 227-250. Mendelson, A., &Pearlmutter, N. J. (1999). Individual differences in relative clause attachment preferences. Poster presented at the Twelfth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York. Mitchell, D., Cuertos, F., Corley, M. B., & Brysbaert, M. (1995). Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 469-488. Miyao, M., &Omaki, A. (2006). No ambiguity about it: Korean learners of Japanese have a clear attachment preference. In D. Bamman, T., Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), A Supplement to the Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development Supplement, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Papadopoulou, D., &Clahsen, H. (2003). Parsing strategies in L1 and L2 sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25 (4), 501-528. Pickering M. J. & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633-651. Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 134 (3), 427-459. Reitter, D., Keller, F., & Moore, J. D. (2011). A computational cognitive model of syntactic priming. Cognitive Science, 35 (4), 587-637. Saldanha, G., & O'Brien, S. (2013). Research methodologies in translation studies. New York, NY: Routledge. Scheepers, C. (2003). Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: Persistence of structural configuration in sentence production. Cognition, 89, 179-205. Sekerina, I. (1997). The late closure principle vs. the balance principle: Evidence from on-line processing of ambiguous Russian sentences. In P. Costa (Ed.), The Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages, University of Potsdam, Germany. Sekerina, I., Fernández, E. &Petrova, K. (2004). Relative clause attachment in Bulgarian. In O. Arnaudova, W. Browne, M. L. Rivero& D. Stojanović (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Ottawa Meeting 2003. Ann Arbor, MI, 375-394. Siriwittayakorn, T., Ratitamkul, T., Miyamoto, E. T., & Cho, H. (2014). A non-local attachment preference in the production and comprehension of Thais relative clauses. 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language and Information and Computation, (pp. 575-584). Townsend, D.J., &Bever, T.G. (2001). Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zagar, D., Pynte, J., & Rativeau, S. (1997). Evidence for early closure attachment and first pass reading times in French. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 50(2), 421-438.

Evrensel bir çözümleyici ya da dile özgü çözümleme stratejileri: Türkçe’de ilgi tümcelerini isim tamlamalarında tamlayan ya da tamlanan ile bağlama tercihleri

Year 2019, RumeliDE 2019.Ö6 - Bandırma Onyedi Eylül Üniversitesi Uluslararası Filoloji Çalışmaları Konferansı, 1 - 21, 21.11.2019
https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.648403

Abstract

Bu çalışmada bir dizi deney ile tek dilli Türkçe
konuşanların ilgi tümcesi bağlama tercihlerinde sözdizimsel hazırlama etkisi
incelenmiştir. İlgi tümcesi bağlama tercihlerinin diller arasında farklılık
göstermesi, çözümleme stratejilerinin evrensel ilkelere değil dile özgü
değiştirgenlere bağlı olabileceği fikrini ortaya çıkarmıştır. Bu nedenle,
birçok model çözümleyicinin evrenselliği, ilk analizde işleyen altta yatan
mekanizma, ve cümle işlemlemede kullanılan bilgi kaynaklarıyla ilgili
varsayımlarını ileri sürmüştür. Ancak, farklı materyaller ve yöntemler
kullanılarak farklı dillerde yapılan bir çok çalışmada elde edilen bir biriyle
çelişen bulguları açıklayacak tek bir model henüz mevcut değil. İlgi tümcesi
bağlama tercihlerini detaylı bir şekilde incelemek için, bu çalışmada iki
çevrimdışı (kağıt-kalem) ve bir çevrimiçi (kendi hızında okuma) yöntemi
kullandık. Sonuçlar bir dizi etken kontrol edildiğinde tek dilli Türkçe konuşan
bireylerin belirli bir bağlama tercihi göstermediğini ortaya koymuştur. Başka
bir deyişle, ilgi tümcesi bağlama tercihlerinin anlamsal etkenlere     (örn. tamlayan ve tamlanan isimlerin yakın
ve uzak yüklem ile anlamsal ilişkisi), çalışma şartları (örn. örtülü işlemleme
veya yönlendirilmiş değerlendirme), ve kullanılan tekniklere (örn. çevrimdışı
veya çevrimiçi) bağlı olarak değişiklik göstermektedir. Yine de, sözdizimsel
hazırlama etkisi, tek dilli Türkçe konuşan bireylerin alternatif bağlama
yorumlarının ağaç yapısını (aşamalı oluşumunu) ayrıştırdığını göstermektedir.
Ayrıca, sonuçlar NP1 (tamlayan) ile bağlama tercihi eğilimi göstermenin yapısal
karmaşıklık (etken ve edilgen) ve çalışma deseni (çevrimiçi ve çevrimdışı, ya
da dikkatin yönlendirilmesi veya örtük işlemle) gibi koşullardan doğan bilişsel
talebi azaltma stratejisi olarak işlemleme zorluğu ile
ilişkilendirilebileceğini önermektedir. 

References

  • Abdelghany, H. (2010). Prosodic phrasing and modifier attachment in Standard Arabic sentence processing. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). City University of New York, NY. Arabmofrad, A., &Marefat, H. (2008). Relative clause attachment ambiguity resolution in Persian. Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), 11(1), 29-48. Aydın, Ö. (2007). The comprehension of Turkish relative clauses in second language acquisition and agrammatism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 295-315. Bahadır, G. (2012). Structural priming in Turkish genitive-possessive constructions. (Doctoral dissertation). Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Başer, Z. (2018). Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387. Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., Liversedge, S. P., Stewart, A. J., & Urbach, T. P. (1995). Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental representation of language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24(6), 489-506. Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D.C. (1996). Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A (3), 664-695. Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. Jr. (1999). Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eye-tracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory & Cognition, 27 (5), 826-833. Carreiras, M., Salillas, E., & Barber, H. (2004). Event-related potentials elicited during parsing of ambiguous relative clauses in Spanish. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 98-105. Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the late closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30(1), 73-105. Desmet, T. & Declercq, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 610-632. De Vincenzi, M., & Job, R. (1993). Some observations on the universality of the late-closure strategy. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22(2), 189-206. Dinçtopal, N. (2007). Syntactic processing in second language acquisition of English. (Unpublished master's thesis). Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Dinçtopal-Deniz, N. (2010). Relative clause attachment preferences of Turkish L2 speakers of English Shallow parsing in the L2? In B. VanPatten& J. Jegerski (Eds.), Research on second language processing and parsing (pp. 27-63). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ehrlich, K., Fernández, E., Fodor, J. D., Stenshoel, E., &Vinereanu, M. (1999). Low attachment of relative clauses: New data from Swedish, Norwegian, and Romanian. Poster presented at the 12th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York. Fernández, E.M. (2000). Bilingual sentence processing: Relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). CUNY Graduate Center, NY. Fernández, E. M. (2003). Bilingual Sentence Processing: Relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ferreira, F. (1991). Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation times for prepared utterances. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 210-233. Fodor, J. D. (1998). Learning to parse? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(2), 285-319. Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (1996). Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frazier, L., &Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291-325. Gertken, S.E.M. (2013). Priming of relative clause attachment during comprehension in French as a first and second language. (Doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Austin. Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzalez, E., &Hickock, G. (1996). Recency preferences in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition, 59, 23-59. Gilboy, E., Sopena, J., Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1995). Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs. Cognition, 54,131-167. Göksel, A., &Kerslake, C. (2005). Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. Göksel, A., &Kerslake, C. (2011). Turkish, an essential grammar. London: Routledge. Hartsuiker, R. J., &Westenberg, C. (2000). Word order priming in written and spoken sentence production. Cognition, 75 (2),27-39. Hemforth, B., Konieczyn, L., Scheepers, C., &Strube, G. (1998). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in German. In D. Hillert (Ed.), Sentence processing: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 293-312). San Diego: Academic Press. Hemfort, B., Fernández, S., Clifton, C., Frazier, L., Konieczyn, L., & Walter, M. (2015). Relative clause attachment in German, English, Spanish and French: Effects of position and length. Lingua, 166, 43-64. Kamide, Y., & Mitchell, D. C. (1997). Relative clause attachment: Nondeterminism in Japanese parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(2), 247-254. Kırkıcı, B. (2004). The processing of relative clause attachment ambiguities in Turkish. Turkic Languages, 8, 111-121. Kirk, R. E. (2009). Experimental design. In R.E. Millsap & A. Maydeu-Olivares (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of quantitative methods in psychology (23-45). New Delhi, India: SAGE. Lee, D., &Kweon, S. (2004). A sentence processing study of relative clause in Korean with two attachment sites. Discourse and Cognition, 11, 126-141. Lovrić, N. (2003). Implicit prosody in silent reading: Relative clause attachment in Croatian.(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). CUNY Graduate Center, NY. Maia, M., Fernández, E. M., Costa, A., &Lourenço-Gomes, M. (2007). Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 5(6), 227-250. Mendelson, A., &Pearlmutter, N. J. (1999). Individual differences in relative clause attachment preferences. Poster presented at the Twelfth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York. Mitchell, D., Cuertos, F., Corley, M. B., & Brysbaert, M. (1995). Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 469-488. Miyao, M., &Omaki, A. (2006). No ambiguity about it: Korean learners of Japanese have a clear attachment preference. In D. Bamman, T., Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), A Supplement to the Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development Supplement, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Papadopoulou, D., &Clahsen, H. (2003). Parsing strategies in L1 and L2 sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25 (4), 501-528. Pickering M. J. & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633-651. Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 134 (3), 427-459. Reitter, D., Keller, F., & Moore, J. D. (2011). A computational cognitive model of syntactic priming. Cognitive Science, 35 (4), 587-637. Saldanha, G., & O'Brien, S. (2013). Research methodologies in translation studies. New York, NY: Routledge. Scheepers, C. (2003). Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: Persistence of structural configuration in sentence production. Cognition, 89, 179-205. Sekerina, I. (1997). The late closure principle vs. the balance principle: Evidence from on-line processing of ambiguous Russian sentences. In P. Costa (Ed.), The Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages, University of Potsdam, Germany. Sekerina, I., Fernández, E. &Petrova, K. (2004). Relative clause attachment in Bulgarian. In O. Arnaudova, W. Browne, M. L. Rivero& D. Stojanović (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Ottawa Meeting 2003. Ann Arbor, MI, 375-394. Siriwittayakorn, T., Ratitamkul, T., Miyamoto, E. T., & Cho, H. (2014). A non-local attachment preference in the production and comprehension of Thais relative clauses. 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language and Information and Computation, (pp. 575-584). Townsend, D.J., &Bever, T.G. (2001). Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zagar, D., Pynte, J., & Rativeau, S. (1997). Evidence for early closure attachment and first pass reading times in French. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 50(2), 421-438.
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Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Linguistics
Journal Section Turkish language, culture and literature
Authors

Zeynep Başer 0000-0003-4391-4075

Publication Date November 21, 2019
Published in Issue Year 2019 RumeliDE 2019.Ö6 - Bandırma Onyedi Eylül Üniversitesi Uluslararası Filoloji Çalışmaları Konferansı

Cite

APA Başer, Z. (2019). A universal parser or language specific parsing strategies: A study on relative clause attachment preference in Turkish. RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi1-21. https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.648403