Locality effects for adverbials: A case of Japanese adverbial NPIs
Kentaro Nakatani <[email protected]>
Dept of English, Konan University / Dept of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
Locality effects
Confounds pertaining to nominal NPIs
• Grammatical relations between words must be kept track of.
• Greater distance –> greater processing cost
• Such locality effects may be caused by:
•
The number of discourse referents (Gibson, 2000)
Memory decay (Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Lewis et al., 2006)
Similarity-based retrieval interference (ibid.)
Experimental results are mixed
✓Locality effects for English filler-gap integrations (e.g., Grodner & Gibson, 2005; Gibson, 2000; also Lewis et al., 2006)
×No locality effects effects with SOV order (German (Konieczny,
2000), Hindi (Vasishth & Lewis, 2006), Japanese (Nakatani & Gibson,
2008, 2010).
Japanese: No slowdown at V
1. NP-NOM [complement clause] V (nested)
2. [complement clause] NP-NOM V (local)
×No effects in ERP: Phillips et al.'s (2005) ERP study on English whdependencies yielded very little evidence for locality effects.
✓Resurgence of locality effects: Finer-grained experimental
manipulations and analyses detected locality effects in:
–simple subject-verb integrations in English (Bartek et al., 2011) –relative clauses in German (Levy & Keller, 2013)
✓Higher-order grammatical relations in Japanese:
In head-final languages, bayesian expectation may override locality
effects in base-line thematic integrations; What about higher-order
grammatical relations layered atop thematic relations?
• Wh-integrations (Ono & Nakatani, 2014)
(1) slower
than (2) at V-Q (where Q is a question marker)
1. whoNOM [complement clause] V-Q (nested)
2. [complement clause] who-NOM V-Q (local)
• NPI-licensing (Nakatani, 2009, CUNY poster)
Results
Overall (all participants)
Adverbial NPIs
Negated sentence with a manner adverb ~> negation scopes over the adverb.
John did not state it clearly ~> John did state it, but not clearly
Japanese contrast marker -wa (a functional variant of topic marker -wa), when
attached to a manner adverb with a maximally positive connotation ("clearly",
"perfectly", "promptly", etc.), drastically elevates an expectation for a negative
context (Hara, 2006; Sawada, 2013), making the adverb a "near" NPI.
Critical region 6 (V-NEG-PAST-CONJ):
All participants
No main effects of NPI or Locality
With better comprehenders
(whose comprehension accuracy
rates > median 78.9%), there was
an interaction between the 2
factors (F1(2,78)=4.34, p <.02;
F2(2,62)=3.29, p <.05).
2.John-wa hakkirito-wa { #nobe-ta / nobe-nakat-ta }. John-TOP clearly-WA { #state-PAST / state-NEG-PAST }
“John { #did state / did not state } clearly.”
t=3.37**
cf.John-wa bon’yarito-wa { nobe-ta / nobe-nakat-ta }. John-TOP vaguely-WA { state-PAST / state-NEG-PAST }
“John { did state / did not state } vaguely.”
Design
Locality x NPI factor {NonNPI (bare Adv) / NPI (Adv-wa)}
Nested conditions:
プロデューサーが1 | はっきりと/はっきりとは2 | 助監督の3 | 楽屋での4 | 盗みを5 |
producer-NOM1 | assistant.director-GEN2 | backstage-GEN3 | theft-ACC4 | clearly/clearly-WA5 |
証言しなかったので6 | ...
testify-NEG-PAST-CONJ6 | ...
``Because the producer did not clearly testify the assistant director’s theft at the
dressing room, ...’’
The NPI factor did not affect the truth-conditional semantics because -wa was merely
an emphatic element (if it invokes a conventional implicature).
NESTED
LOCAL
Better comprehenders
t=1.66
Local conditions:
プロデューサーが1 | 助監督の2 | 楽屋での3 | 盗みを4 | はっきりと/はっきりとは5 |
[cf. lesser comprehenders]
RT data trimmed at 3 SDs in each EXPTxCONDxRNUM cell
rt ~ nest+npi+int+spillover+ (nest+npi+int+1|subj) + (nest+npi+int+1|item)
Analyses were also run for the data from better comprehenders (comprehension accuracy rates > the median)
Lots of NPs in each target sentence: ––The source of locality effects: Similarity interference or memory decay?
testify-NEG-PAST-CONJ6 | ...
LOCAL
•
Case ambiguity present in nominal NPIs:
––When the nominal NPI marker -sika is attached, nominative and accusative
markers are obligatorily deleted.
•
•
•
LOCAL
Adverbial NPI was the only adverb and the only NPI in the clause = no similar items.
LOCAL
NESTED
Estimate Std. Error t value
(Intercept) 650.601
19.695 33.034
nest
26.495
7.776
3.407
npi
-16.927
7.510 -2.254
int
9.356
7.022
1.332
spillover
0.217
0.025
8.633
NESTED
Estimate Std. Error t value
(Intercept) 664.225
21.432 30.992
nest
27.394
9.148
2.994
npi
-20.050
9.336 -2.148
int
15.798
8.292
1.905
spillover
0.237
0.028
8.471
Discussion and conclusion
•
証言しなかったので6 | ...
(NPI, nested)
(NPI, local)
(NOM, nested)
(NOM, local)
NESTED
•
86 native Japanese speakers, mostly undergrads at Konan.
Self-paced reading experiment with on-cumulative word-by-word presentation
16 items + 64 fillers = 80 sentences distributed in a Latin-Square design
Each trial accompanied by a forced choice comprehension question
Analyses
producer-NOM1 | clearly/clearly-WA2 | assistant.director-GEN3 | backstage-GEN4 | theft-ACC5 |
[better comprehenders]
•
•
Note: Nominal NPI-marker X-sika literally translates as “anybody/anything but X”; combined with NEG, it
will eventually mean “nobody/nothing but X”, which is an affirmative proposition with regard to X.
•
•
•
•
1.John-wa hakkirito { nobe-ta / nobe-nakat-ta }. John-TOP clearly { state-PAST / state-NEG-PAST }
“John { stated / did not state } clearly.”
Resurgence of locality effects
Locality x NPI interaction at V-NEG
1.a. NP-NPI [complement clause] V-NEG
b. [complement clause] NP-NPI V-NEG
2.a. NP-NOM [complement clause] V-NEG
b. [complement clause] NP-NOM V-NEG
NPI and NOM conditions are truth-conditionally distinct:
NOM: 店長が ... 信じなかった ``The manager did not believe.’’
NPI: 店長しか ... 信じなかった ``Nobody but the manager believed.’’ = “The manager did believe”
Methods
Another piece of evidence for Locality effects
•
•
•
Locality matters for adverbials
The effects tended to be larger for NPI-like adverbials
Higher-order processing seems to be more locality-sensitive
•
The effects were more likely to be caused by memory decay (Van
Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Lewis et al., 2006) or structural complexity
(Gibson, 2000), not by similarity interference.
•
Locality effects were speedup effects for local integration, rather
than slowdown effects for nested integration. Why speedup?
•
•
NPI generally speeds up the processing because of higher expectation for
negation; thus NPI x Local = baseline / NPI x Nested = slowdown
Also: NPI x Local may have been faster because of the bottom-up
processing within a “local window” (Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Tabor &
Hutchins, 2004; Tabor et al. 2004; Kempen & Vosse, 1989; Vosse &
Kempen, 2000); Local NPIs were processed more quickly than distant NPIs
because they were within the local window including NEG.
The 29th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 4th, 2016, at University of Florida
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