Reaction Time as a Measure of Implicit
Grammaticality Judgment
Misha Becker
UNC Chapel Hill
[email protected]
October 1, 2014
1
Rationale
As linguists, we want to know about a speaker’s/learner’s underlying grammatical knowledge → competence. How do we determine this? One way: metalinguistic grammaticality
judgments
• adults
• children (McDaniel and Cairns, 1996)
→ word order, pronoun reference, interrogatives
1.1
Abstract Predicates
Question: How do children determine the argument structure properties of (abstract)
novel predicates? (seem, easy)
Concrete predicates: eat, run, pink provide some experiential evidence
ex. run: ‘self-initiated motion’
(1) John ran (to/in the park).
(2)
* John ran [that he was tired].
(3) John verbed (to/in the park) → verb could denote motion, probably not mental
state
(4) John verbed that he was tired → verb could denote mental state or communication, probably not motion
seem, easy → no clear experiential basis for lexical semantics
Surface overlap, different underlying structures (Davies and Dubinsky, 2004; Lees, 1960;
Chomsky, 1964):
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M. Becker ERP Conference
Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
(5) Johni seems [ti to be friendly.]
raising verb
(6) Johni claims [PROi to be friendly.]
control verb
(7) Johni is easy [PROarb to please ti ]
tough adjective
(8) Johni is eager PROi to please e]
control adjective
But there are important syntactic differences between these subclasses.
(9) It seems/*claims to be cloudy.
(10) It is easy/*eager to please John.
How can we test categorization in children? Present them with a predicate with an
expletive subject and see if these sentences are grammatical (Becker, 2014, to appear):
(11) It gorps to be raining.
(12) It is daxy to please John.
Are these sentences grammatical?
• yes → gorp, daxy don’t select Agent/Experiencer subject → raising/tough
• no → gorp, daxy do select Agent/Experiencer subject → control (or non-raising/tough)
2
Methodology
2.1
Assessing Implicit Knowledge
Babies/children indicate surprise when faced with something unexpected.
• sucking/heart rate → categorical perception (Eimas et al., 1971)
• looking time →
expectations about how physical objects/ people
move (Spelke, 1988, 1991; Spelke et al., 1995)
→
expectations about observer’s knowledge of hidden object (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005)
Looking time in linguistic tasks:
• Head-turn Preference Procedure: time looking toward sound source
→ can’t really be used with children over 2 or 3
• Preferential Looking Paradigm: time looking toward matching visual scene/referent
→ measures semantic interpretation but not evaluation of linguistic form
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M. Becker ERP Conference
2.2
Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
Reaction Time
• RT is widely used to measure language processing in adult speakers (Rubenstein
et al., 1970; Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971; Luce, 1986, among many others)
→ “double-take” in response to ungrammaticality, garden-path
→ longer time to respond/process
• Children show surprise in response to unexpected input
• Ungrammatical input is unexpected → slow response
• ⇒ Assess implicit grammaticality judgment by measuring time to answer grammatical/ungrammatical question
Previous uses of RT in language acquisition (meta-linguistic tasks):
• L1 acquisition (Corrigan, 1988; Naigles et al., 1995)
• L2 acquisition (Bley-Vroman and Masterson, 1989)
My proposal: Pose yes/no questions
⇒ Children should show surprise → longer RT ← when the question sounds ungrammatical
Imagine you hear the following dialogue:
A:
B:
A:
B:
A:
Hey! The policeman is sleeping!
Really? The policeman is sleeping?
Yeah! The policeman is sleeping.
Wow! Is the nurse sleeping too?
No, the nurse is not sleeping.
And then you are asked:
1. Is the nurse sleeping?
2. Is the policeman sleeping the nurse?
2.3
Measuring Children’s Reaction Time
• videotape session so child’s face is visible
• child watches short video with dialogue
• puppet poses 2 yes/no questions
– grammatical
– ungrammatical
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M. Becker ERP Conference
Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
• record child’s response → Dependent variable of interest is RT, not correctness (for
grammatical questions)
How to measure RT?
• stopwatch
• ELAN: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/
Preparing Data for ELAN:
• create iMovie project for each child
• import Q&A session for each item
• Share > Export using Quicktime → .mov file of video
• change export settings to “Sound to Wave” → .wav file of audio
• import both into ELAN for coding and analysis
Using ELAN:
• Open ELAN
• File > New
• Media: highlight the relevant .wav and .mov files and “add” them
• Template: select a template for coding if you have one and “add” it
• Click OK
2.4
Some Results: Warm-up and Filler Items
3.4 3.5 3.3 3.4 3.2 3.3 3 G 2.9 UG 2.8 RT (log10) RT (log10) 3.1 3.2 3.1 G UG 3 2.9 2.7 2.8 2.6 2.7 2.5 play borrow ballop(intrans) 3-­‐pet zorp(trans) Lexeme Experiment 1: children ages 4–7 years
4-­‐pet 3-­‐sleep Age and Lexeme 4-­‐sleep Experiment 2: children ages 3–4 years
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M. Becker ERP Conference
2.5
Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
Novel Abstract Predicates
What about novel abstract predicates?
• Teach children novel adjectives by using them 5 times in a dialogue
• In some conditions: provided semantic context to allow children to categorize novel
adjectives as tough-adjectives or control adjectives.
• After the dialogue, pose a yes/no question in a sentence frame not heard before.
√
– Is it daxy to draw an apple? ( easy)
– Is the tree daxy? (*easy)
3.3 3.2 RT (log10) 3.1 3 2.9 tough-­‐adjective 2.8 2.7 2.6 2.5 Is it daxy to draw…? Is the tree daxy? Children ages 4–7 years
2.6
Dealing with Extreme Values
We must be able to discriminate genuine from spurious responses.
• 2 SDs above or below the mean for an item
• absolute cut-offs: 100 ms (lower bound), 5 s (upper bound)
• children may take longer: up to 12 s for upper bound
With children, need to take other factors into account:
• whether child is overall slow or fast to respond
• whether the child gives other indications of paying attention/not paying attention
(e.g. eye gaze)
• whether the child answers correctly on the grammatical questions.
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M. Becker ERP Conference
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Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
Future Directions
• test adult controls
• test wider range of stimuli
– other argument structure errors/other lexical items
– other types of ungrammaticality (agreement, tense, aspect, etc.)
• test wider range of ages, especially younger children
• explore connection to ERP
References
Becker, Misha. 2014. Learning structures with derived arguments. In Syntactic complexity
across interfaces, ed. Andreas Trotzke and Josef Bayer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Becker, Misha. to appear. Animacy and the acquisition of tough-adjectives. Language
Acquisition .
Bley-Vroman, Robert, and Deborah Masterson. 1989. Reaction time as a supplement to
grammaticality judgments in the investigation of second language learners’ competence.
In University of hawai’i working papers in esl , volume 8, 207–237.
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton.
Corrigan, Roberta. 1988. Children’s identification of actors and patients in prototypical
and nonprototypical sentence types. Cognitive Development 3:285–297.
Davies, William D., and Stanley Dubinsky. 2004. The grammar of raising and control .
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Eimas, Peter, E. Siqueland, P. Jusczyk, and J. Vigorito. 1971. Speech perception in
infants. Science 171:303–306.
Lees, Robert B. 1960. A multiply ambiguous adjectival construction in English. Language
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Luce, R. Duncan. 1986. Response times. New York: Oxford University Press.
McDaniel, Dana, and Helen Cairns. 1996. Eliciting judgments of grammaticality and reference. In Methods for assessing children’s syntax , ed. Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee,
and Helen Smith Cairns, 233–254. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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M. Becker ERP Conference
Madrid
October 1–3, 2014
Meyer, David, and Roger Schvaneveldt. 1971. Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words:
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Naigles, Letitia, Anne Fowler, and Atessa Helm. 1995. Syntactic bootstrapping from
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299–330. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Onishi, Kristine, and Renée Baillargeon. 2005. Do 15-month-old infants understand false
beliefs? Science 308:255–258.
Rubenstein, H., L. Garfield, and J. Millikan. 1970. Homographic entries in the internal
lexicon. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 9:487–492.
Spelke, Elizabeth. 1988. Where perceiving ends and thinking begins: The apprehension
of objects in infancy. In Perceptual development in infancy, ed. A. Yonas, volume 20
of Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Spelke, Elizabeth. 1991. Physical knowledge in infancy: Reflections on Piaget’s theory. In
The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition, ed. Susan Carey and Rochel
Gelman, 133–170. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Spelke, Elizabeth S., Ann Phillips, and Amanda L. Woodward. 1995. Infants’ knowledge
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