University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses April 2021 There and Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory Caroline Andrews University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons Recommended Citation Andrews, Caroline, "There and Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory" (2021). Doctoral Dissertations. 2090. https://doi.org/10.7275/19826911 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2090 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses There and Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory Caroline Andrews Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons THERE AND GONE AGAIN: SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IN MEMORY A Dissertation Presented by CAROLINE ANDREWS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2021 Linguistics c Copyright by Caroline Andrews 2021 All Rights Reserved THERE AND GONE AGAIN: SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IN MEMORY A Dissertation Presented by CAROLINE ANDREWS Approved as to style and content by: Brian Dillon, Chair John Kingston, Member Adrian Staub, Member Joe Pater, Department Chair Linguistics To my parents and my brother, who have taught me so many things, not the least of which were courage and curiosity. And to my many wonder- ful teachers, especially Pat, Paulette, and Laurie, who got me started on writing and on science. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, many thanks are due to my committee: Brian Dillon, John Kingston, and Adrian Staub. Brian gracefully accepted the role of my chair well before he had the title officially. He is a natural scientist in the way he thinks, with a deep grasp on how the details matter, and his influence shaped me into a far better scientist. It is thanks to him and his unshakeable commitment to being a good advisor for his students that I was able to go from a first-year with slightly out- there research goals to leaving with a dissertation and a postdoc that meets those goals. John Kingston has been at once a phenomenal mentor, a climbing buddy, and a friend. I shall miss dearly him for all of these. This document (and much more besides) would certainly not have been possible without him and if I were someday to be half as good a mentor as he is, I should be very pleased. Adrian Staub’s mark on this dissertation comes from his consistently on point scientific scep- ticism, that at once makes it clear how complex psycholinguistic problems are and makes them more interesting. In addition to my dissertation committee, there were other faculty members as UMass who deserve serious thanks. Kyle Johnson was an invaluable source of good syntax-related questions, patience with psycholinguists, professional advice, and humor. Ellen Woolford made me a much better writer and was supportive of my interest in fieldwork. Gaja Jarosz has been an enthusiastic adventure buddy, a good friend, and a python mentor. Lyn Frazier was an inspiration for her tremendous insight as both a psycholinguist and teacher. Caren Rotello and Andrew Cohen are responsible for reinventing statistics for me and making it a joy in its own right. Additional thanks goes to Rajesh Bhatt and Peggy Speas. Non-UMass faculty who made my graduate career possible include Claire Halpert, Matthew Wagers, and of course, Pranav Anand. Beyond the faculty, a number of people deserve credit for enriching my time at UMass. In Linguistics, this included Katia Vostrikova, David Erschler, Jyoti Iyer, Jeremy Pasquereau, and more recently Anissa Neal. Anthony Yacovone and Stephanie Rich belong on this list as well, no less for being undergrads at the time. Equal thanks goes to Will Hopper, Josh Levy, Andrea Cataldo, and Merika Wilson, who made the cognitive division of Psychology a second home. v Much appreciation goes to Coral Hughto, for being witty, kind, and an all-around decent person, Sakshi Bhatia for many hours of syntactic (and non-syntactic) discussion, Rodica Ivan, also for many hours of non-scholastic discussion, Lap-Ching Keung for being my twin in over in Tobin, and Claire Moore-Cantwell, for taking on the role of older psycholinguist, for much needed day- dreaming about adventures, and for freezing in the desert in winter with me. Thuy Bui was my office buddy and all-around best person to kvetch with at a time when kvetching was very much needed. I’m grateful to Ria Mai Geguera for first being the best student in my class, then a truly excellent lab manager, and then a good friend. Several research assistants contributed greatly to this work, especially Christian Muxica, Bhavya Pant, Amanda Doucette, and Annina van Riper. There are four additional people who deserve special mention, and who truly shaped my graduate student career. Shayne Sloggett has been an older academic brother in so many ways. Amanda Rysling deserves thanks for inviting me to stay on her (Shayne’s) couch, and really just about everything that happened after that, including panda, wine, late nights at the office and their apartment, and the shelter of a like-minded place. Alex Goebel was, well, a friend under what were at times the hardest possible circumstances to be a friend. I’m grateful to him for lending me space in his office to work, for sticky notes, for company on rides home, for playing Ocarina of Time, and being a fellow fan of the Mountain Goats. The last, but certainly not least in this category is Tom Maxfield, who somehow managed to be better at problem solving than I was at creating at problems (no small feat). I owe him for endless hours of chatting, much chocolate, advice, and making so many things possible. Finally, I’m grateful to my family —Ned, Sharon, and Graham —for being curious alongside me from the beginning. vi ABSTRACT THERE AND GONE AGAIN: SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IN MEMORY FEBRUARY 2021 CAROLINE ANDREWS B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Brian Dillon This dissertation addresses the relationship between hierarchical syntactic structure and mem- ory in language processing of individual sentences. Hierarchical syntactic structure is a key part of human languages and language processing but its integration with memory has been uneasy ever since Sachs (1967) demonstrated that the syntactic structure of individual sentences is lost in explicit sentence recall tasks much faster than other linguistic information (lexical, semantic, etc.). Nonetheless, psycholinguists have continued to draw on memory in syntactic processing theories, in part due to (i) the explanatory power that memory can give to sentence processing hypotheses, and (ii) the conflicting results that continually replicate the basic findings of Sachs (1967, 1974) on one hand while on the other hand supporting robust, long-term implicit persistence of syntactic structure in the form of abstract syntactic priming. The dissertation provides three case studies on syntactic structure in memory at three dif- ferent time points over the course of processing. One case-study revisits syntactic persistence during the timescale which has classically provided the bulk of the evidence against syntactic structure in memory, from late in online processing to early offline processing, using a compar- ison of ellipsis-antecedent resolution and recognition memory over time. A second case-study looks at the sensitivity of proposed memory-operations to subject-verb agreement versus reflexive anaphora at the earliest timescale, during online sentence processing. Finally, the second half of vii the dissertation focuses on the reliability of abstract syntactic priming in comprehension, with an extended test of Syntactic Adaptation theory (Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian, 2013). The dissertation argues that while there is still some good evidence in favor of syntactic struc- ture in memory, theories which intend to control most of online sentence processing from memory are probably premature. Even if memory does turn out to play a role in the syntactic process- ing of individual sentences, domain general, declarative memory is most likely an insufficient architecture to capture even the data which is most supportive of a memory-based account. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................. v ABSTRACT ............................................................................. vii LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................... xii LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................... xv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................... 1 1.0.1 Access to Syntactic Structure. 2 1.0.2 Cue-Based Memory Models . 6 1.0.3 The Regeneration Hypothesis . 7 1.0.4 Memory and Syntactic Structure . 8 2. ACCESS TO SYNTACTIC MEMORY IN VERB PHRASE ELLIPSIS .................... 10 2.1 Introduction .