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Studies on Sentence Production and Comprehension in Tagalog and German PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/176833 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2019-01-10 and may be subject to change. The role of voice and word order in incremental sentence processing Studies on sentence production and comprehension in Tagalog and German Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J. H. J. M. Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 10 october 2017 om 16.30 uur precies door Sebastian Sauppe geboren op 23 maart 1987 te Borna (Duitsland) Promotoren Prof. dr. Stephen C. Levinson Prof. dr. Robert D. Van Valin, Jr (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Duitsland & University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Verenigde Staten) Copromotor Dr. Elisabeth Norcliffe (Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen) Manuscriptcommissie Prof. dr. Antje S. Meyer Prof. dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (Universität zu Köln, Duitsland) Prof. dr. T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester, Verenigde Staten) Copyright: Sebastian Sauppe, 2017. All rights reserved. Cover graphic generated using http://qrohlf.com/trianglify/ Printed and bound by Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A great number of people helped me the one way or the other during my time as a PhD student. Even if I don’t mention all of them here to keep it short, they can be assured that I am grateful to all of them. First of all, I would like to thank Stephen C. Levinson for giving me the opportunity to conduct my PhD research at the Language and Cognition department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguis- tics and for giving me huge academic freedom, allowing me to explore my ideas, yet always pushing me back on track when I wandered to far astray. Without his ideas, insights and support this research would not have been possible. I also thank Elisabeth Norcliffe for being the most wonderful men- tor and supervisor I could have ever hoped for. I thank Robert D. Van Valin, Jr, for his advice, patiently answering the many questions that I had over the years and reading the drafts of all the papers in this thesis in basically no time. I thank T. Florian Jaeger for the discussions on theories, methods and statistics that we had over the years and that helped to improve the research in this thesis greatly. I thank Xaver Koch for introducing me to pupillometry and for many very helpful discussions. His raised eyebrows led me to overthink many methodological and statistical decisions. I thank Agnieszka Konopka for introducing me to eye tracking, many helpful discussions and answering innumerable ques- tions about sentence production theories and about eye tracking. I thank Anja Latrouite for her insights into Tagalog grammar and for helping me make sense of some of syntactic phenomena. ii iii I am deeply grateful to Philip A. Rentillo, who helped me to con- duct the Tagalog production experiments and who has become a dear friend since I first met him in 2012. He patiently answered all my questions about how to say this or that in Tagalog; without his translation help, it would not have been possible to conduct these experiments. I also thank Inger M. Montemor for translating vari- ous materials into Tagalog and for answering my questions about the language, Ronald Fischer and Reiner Dirksmeyer for their technical support, and Frédérique Schless and Emiel van den Hoven for help in processing the data I collected. I thank Edith Sjoerdsma for her help with so many practicalities and administrative things. I thank Frédérique Schless, Julija Baranova and Edith Sjoerdsma for help with the translation of the Dutch sum- mary of the thesis results. My thank goes also to Luise Dorenbusch for invaluable help with the typesetting of this thesis. I warmly thank Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez and Mathias Barthel for sharing the apartment or the office with me, respectively, during my time in Nijmegen, for their critical questions along the way of carrying out and writing up the research in this thesis, and for being my paranymphoi. Finally,I thank Julia and Friederike for being there and for motivat- ing me to be good at what I do. CONTENTS i introductory remarks 2 1 introductory remarks 4 1.1 Incrementality in sentence production 6 1.2 Incrementality in sentence comprehension 11 1.3 Reading guide 13 ii voice and word order in sentence production 14 2 head-marking morphology influences the time course of verb-initial sentence production: eye tracking evidence from tagalog 16 2.1 Introduction 17 2.1.1 Theories of sentence production 18 2.1.2 Tagalog 27 2.1.3 Current experiments 30 2.2 Experiment 1 37 2.2.1 Method 37 2.2.2 Results 40 2.2.3 Discussion 48 2.3 Experiment 2 50 2.3.1 Participants 51 2.3.2 Materials, design and procedure 52 2.3.3 Sentence scoring and analyses 52 2.3.4 Results 53 2.3.5 Discussion 60 2.4 General discussion 63 2.4.1 Hierarchically incremental planning 63 iv Contents v 2.4.2 The influence of head-marking morphology on the time course of sentence planning 66 2.5 Conclusions 71 Appendix 72 2.A Target event pictures used in Experiment 1 72 2.B Target event pictures used in Experiment 2 74 3 word order and voice influence the timing of verb planning in german sentence production 76 3.1 Introduction 77 3.2 Methods 87 3.2.1 Participants 87 3.2.2 Materials 87 3.2.3 Apparatus and procedure 88 3.2.4 Sentence scoring and data selection 89 3.2.5 Analyses 90 3.3 Results 93 3.4 Discussion and Conclusions 101 Appendix 105 3.A Analyses of onset latencies of verbs/auxiliaries follow- ing the subject and of second NPs 105 3.B Target stimulus pictures 106 3.C Proportions of fixations 108 3.D Model fits 109 4 symmetrical and asymmetrical voice systems and processing load: pupillometric evidence from sentence production in tagalog and german 110 4.1 Introduction 111 4.1.1 Extending the typology of voice systems 112 4.1.2 Potential consequences for sentence produc- tion 117 4.1.3 Task-evoked pupillary responses 120 4.1.4 Current experiments 122 vi Contents 4.2 Experiments 123 4.2.1 Experiment 1: Tagalog 123 4.2.2 Experiment 2: German 137 4.3 Conclusions 145 iii voice and word order in sentence comprehen- sion 152 5 verbal semantics drives early anticipatory eye movements during the comprehension of verb- initial sentences 154 5.1 Introduction 155 5.1.1 Current Experiment 158 5.2 Experiment 164 5.2.1 Participants 164 5.2.2 Materials and Methods 164 5.2.3 Results 168 5.2.4 Discussion 175 5.3 Conclusions 178 iv concluding remarks 186 6 concluding remarks 188 6.1 Summary of results 188 6.1.1 Chapter2: Theinfluenceofvoicemarkingmor- phology and word order on incremental sen- tence planning in Tagalog 188 6.1.2 Chapter 3: Voice, word order and verb plan- ning in German sentence production 191 6.1.3 Chapter 4: Voice systems and processing load during sentence planning 195 6.1.4 Chapter 5: Voice and word order in Tagalog sentence comprehension 197 6.2 Conclusions 199 Contents vii References 203 v synopses 232 synopsis in english 234 nederlandse synopsis 238 Curriculum Vitae 242 Part I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Die Frage, was der Satz sei, in welchem Verhältnis er zum Wort, zu den psychischen Vorgängen der Verbindung der Vorstellungen und zu den logischen Urteilsakten stehe, — diese Fragen gehören zu den meistumstrittenen oder gelegentlich wohl auch zu den mit Vorliebe vermiedenen der neueren Sprachwissenschaft. Wilhelm Wundt Language processing is fundamentally incremental. Both during the production and the comprehension of sentences, humans process information in pieces rather than as a whole. When formulating a sentence, speakers do not wait until they have planned all of the phonological and phonetic detail of all words in their utterance before they start speaking. Rather, they may start to articulate the sentence as soon as enough information has been encoded. Similarly, during sentence comprehension, listeners do not wait until the end of their interlocutor’s sentence before assigning any grammatical structures or semantic interpretations to the words that they have heard. Rather, they start to interpret the incoming speech continuously and make predictions about upcoming input as soon as possible. The papers in this thesis are concerned with three fundamental issues revolving around how the interaction of the grammatical struc- tures of languages and the planning and understanding of event struc- 4 introductory remarks 5 ture and the relations among agents and patients affect incremental sentence production and comprehension. Specifically, two studies on Tagalog (an Austronesian language of the Philippines) and German are reported that investigate the influ- ence of verb position and voice marking on what kind of information has to be encoded before speaking can begin, i.e., what constitutes “enough information” when the verb is the first, the second or the last word in a sentence (Chapters 2 and 3). Next, the influence of the different voice marking systems of the two languages on cogni- tive processing load during sentence formulation is investigated by analyzing pupillometric data from these production studies (Chapter 4). Finally, a comprehension experiment studied the influence of verb-initial word order and verbal morphology on listeners’ use of information about the verb’s meaning and potential arguments to anticipate upcoming linguistic input (Chapter 5).
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