Attachment and Concord of Temporal Adverbs: Evidence From Eye Movements
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Date
2019Author
Biondo, Nicoletta
Vespignani, Francesco
Dillon, Brian
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Biondo N, Vespignani F and Dillon B (2019) Attachment and Concord of Temporal Adverbs: Evidence From Eye Movements. Front. Psychol. 10:983. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00983
Abstract
The present study examined the processing of temporal adverbial phrases such as
“last week,” which must agree in temporal features with the verb they modify. We
investigated readers’ sensitivity to this feature match or mismatch in two eye-tracking
studies. The main aim of this study was to expand the range of concord phenomena
which have been investigated in real-time processing in order to understand how
linguistic dependencies are formed during sentence comprehension (Felser et al., 2017).
Under a cue-based perspective, linguistic dependency formation relies on an associative
cue-based retrieval mechanism (Lewis et al., 2006; McElree, 2006), but how such
a mechanism is deployed over diverse linguistic dependencies remains a matter of
debate. Are all linguistic features candidate cues that guide retrieval? Are all cues given
similar weight? Are different cues differently weighted based on the dependency being
processed? To address these questions, we implemented a mismatch paradigm (Sturt,
2003) adapted for temporal concord dependencies. This paradigm tested whether
readers were sensitive to a temporal agreement between a temporal adverb like last
week and a linearly distant, but structurally accessible verb, as well as a linearly
proximate but structurally inaccessible verb. We found clear evidence that readers were
sensitive to feature match between the adverb and the linearly distant, structurally
accessible verb. We found no clear evidence on whether feature match with the
inaccessible verb impacted the processing of a temporal adverb. Our results suggest
syntactic positional information plays an important role during the processing of the
temporal concord relation.