Reading and References

We've put together a couple of general readings suggestions for corpus-based research on psycholinguistics in addition to the specific readings mentioned on the syllabus. They are listed below the references.

1. References

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Aissen, J. (2003). Diﬀerential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21, 435–483.
Arnold, J. E., T. Wasow, A. Asudeh, and P. Alrenga (2004). Avoiding attachment ambiguities: The role of constituent ordering. Journal of Memory and Language 55 (1), 55–70.
Arnold, J. E., T. Wasow, T. Losongco, and R. Ginstrom (2000). Heaviness vs. newness: The eﬀects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76 (1), 28–55.
Baayen, H., D. Davidson, and D. Bates (2008). Mixed-eﬀects modeling with crossed random eﬀects for sub jects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390–412.
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bell, A., J. Brenier, M. Gregory, C. Girand, and D. Jurafsky (2009). Predictability eﬀects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60 (1), 92–111.
Bell, A., D. Jurafsky, E. Fosler-Lussier, C. Girand, M. Gregory, and D. Gildea (2003). Eﬀects of disﬂuencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 113 (2), 1001–1024.
Bock, J. K. and R. K. Warren (1985). Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition 21 (1), 47–67.
Bolinger, D. (1972). That’s that (Vol. 155; C. van Schooneveld, Ed.). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. (Studia Memoria Nicolai van Wijk Dedicata)
Branigan, H. P., M. J. Pickering, and M. Tanaka (2007). Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production. Lingua 118, 172–189.
Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., Baayen, H. (2007). Predicting the Dative Alternation. Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation.
Bresnan, J., Dingare, S., and Manning, C. (2001). Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi. Proceedings of the LFG Conference.
Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., Baayen, H. (2007). Predicting the Dative Alternation. Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation.
Bresnan, J. and J. Hay (2008). Gradient grammar: An eﬀect of animacy on the syntax of give in varieties of English. Lingua 118 (2), 245–259.
Choi, H.-W. (2007). Length and Order: A Corpus study of Korean Dative-Accusative Construction. Discourse and Cognition 14 (3), 207-227.
Cook, S. W., T. F. Jaeger, and M. K. Tanenhaus (2009). Producing less preferred structures: More gestures, less ﬂuency. In Proceedings of the 31st Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver.
Dor, D. (2005). Toward a semantic account of that-deletion in English. Linguistics , 43 (2), 345-382.
Ferreira, V. S. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate? syntactic ﬂexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 35 (5), 724–755.
Ferreira, V. S. and G. S. Dell (2000). The eﬀect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production. Cognitive Psychology 40, 296–340.
Fox, B. and S. Thompson. (2007). Relative clauses in English conversation: relativizers, frequency and the notion of construction. Studies in Language 31: 293-326.
Frank, A. and T. F. Jaeger (2008, July). Speaking rationally: Uniform information density as an optimal strategy for language production. In The 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci08), Washington, D.C., pp. 933–938.
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2006). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press.
Gildea, D. and D. Temperley (2008). Optimizing grammars for minimum dependency length. In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Volume 45, pp. 184–191.
Hawkins, J. A. (2007). Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it. New Ideas in Psychology 25 (2), 124–144.
Haywood, S., Pickering, M., and Branigan, H. (2005). Do Speakers Avoid Ambiguities during Dialogue?. Psychological Science.
Jaeger, T. F. (2006). Redundancy and syntactic reduction in spontaneous speech. unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59 (4), 434–446.
Jaeger, T. F. (submitted). Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density.
Jaeger, T.F. (in prep). Corpus-based Research on Language Production: Information Density affects the Syntactic Reduction of Subject Relatives. [article in prep, do not cite or distribute beyond class; to be uploaded soon]
Jaeger, T. F. and C. Kidd (2008). A Uniﬁed Model of Redundancy Avoidance and Strategic Lengthening. Presented at the 21st Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC.
Jaeger, T. F. and E. Norcliﬀe (In press). The cross-linguistic study of sentence production. Language and Linguistics Compass.
Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting oﬀ the goldvarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-eﬀects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (1), 359–383.
Kraljic, T. and S. E. Brennan (2005). Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or for the hearer? Cognitive Psychology 50, 194–231.
Levelt, W. J. M. and B. Maassen (1981). Lexical search and order of mention in sentence production. In W. Klein and W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), Crossing the boundaries in linguistics, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 221–252. D. Reidel.
Lohse, B., J. A. Hawkins, and T. Wasow (2004). Domain minimization in English verb-particle constructions. Language 80 (2), 238–261.
Roland, D., J. L. Elman, and V. S. Ferreira (2005). Why is that? structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences. Cognition , 1–28.
Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communications. Bell Systems Technical Journal 27 (4), 623–656.
Tagliamonte, S. and J. Smith (2005). No momentary fancy! the zero in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9 (2), 289–309.
Tagliamonte, S., J. Smith, and H. Lawrence (2005). No taming the vernacular! insights from the relatives in northern Britain. Language Variation and Change 17, 75–112.
Thompson, Sandra A., and Anthony J. Mulac. The Discourse Conditions for the Use of Complementizer that in Conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics 15: 237-51.
Thompson, Sandra A., and Anthony J. Mulac. A Quantitative Perspective on the Grammaticization of Epistemic Parentheticals in English. In Elizabeth Traugott and Bernd Heine, eds., Grammaticalization II, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 313-339.
Torres Cacoullos, R. and J. A. Walker (in press). On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of “that”. Linguistics 47 (1), 1–43.
Wasow, T. (1997). Endweight from the speaker's perspective. CUNY Publication.
Yaguchi, M. (2001). The function of the non-deictic “that” in English. Journal of Pragmatics , 33 (7), 1125-1155.

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You can download the entire bibliography and more references as an EndNote or BibTex file:

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2. Reading Themes

Each section below summarizes a couple of papers on a particular issue that will be covered in class. We don't expect you to read all these papers; it's more to give you pointers for further readings. At the end of each section you find what we identify to be a good entry reading on that topic. We also use bold-facing to highlight papers that would be good entry readings.

2.1. Accessibility: Availability and Alignment in Sentence Production

Syntactic variation has been attributed to accessibility. For the purpose of this class, accessibility refers to ease of retrieval. Accessibility-based accounts for e.g. word order alternations say that the relative accessibility of the referents described by the different constituents affects speakers' word order preferences.

Two specific proposals have been discussed and tested in detail in the literature. Psycholinguistic alignment accounts (e.g. Bock and Warren, 1985) state that speakers prefer to align conceptually accessible referents with higher grammatical functions (this resembles linguistic accounts of alignments, as e.g. in Aissen, 2003; Bresnan et al., 2001). Availability accounts, on the other hand, state that speakers prefer to mention accessible referents early in the sentence (Levelt & Maassen, 1981; Ferreira, 1996; Ferreira and Dell, 2000). For English these two accounts make very similar predictions, but for other languages they don't necessarily. We recommend Branigan et al. (2007) for a direct comparison and summary of previous work. See also Jaeger and Norcliffe (in press) for a summary of the relevant cross-linguistics work.

Beyond word order variation, availability accounts have also been proposed for optional function word omission, as in:

(1) I like the way (that) it vibrates.

Ferreira and Dell (2000) propose the principle of immediate mention that basically states that speakers produce optional words, such as that in (1), when they cannot readily continue with the pronunciation of the following material (it, in this example), for example, because of lexical retrieval problems. I also really like the Ferreira (1996) work (his masters thesis!), in which he provides evidence that having a choice in production seems to have advantages (which he attributes to the flexibility that results from choice/variation, as it allows speakers to continue with whatever variant is available first). If you read Ferreira (1996), make sure to also read Cook et al. (2009), which follows up on this work (and is just 8pp long).

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2.2. Length and Word Order in Sentence Production

A well-documented phenomenon in sentence production is domain minimization (this is Hawkins' (2004) terminology, but the basic observation goes at least as far back as Behaghel (1909))--speakers, given a choice between multiple word orders, will tend to choose the order that minimizes the distance between dependent elements in the sentence. Take for example sentences (1) and (2).

(1) John walked [with his older, popular sister] [to school.]

(2) John walked [to school] [with his older, popular sister.]

While (1) and (2) encode (let's assume) the same meaning, (2) is predicted to be more likely since this order minimizes the distance between the verb and the heads of its dependent prepositional phrases. In addition to influencing production choices, domain minimization has also been argued to play some role in constraining the space of possible grammars, and is therefore of interest to typologists. Perhaps the most influential theory along these lines is that of John Hawkins, whose 1994 and 2004 books are both classics. We may scan some portions of these, but the basic claims are spelled out in Hawkins (2007), which will be required reading for this section. For experimental support of Hawkins' proposals in Japanese, see Yamashita and Chang (2001); for Korean, see Choi (1997); for English, see e.g. Hawkins (2001) and Lohse et al. (2004).

Domain Minimization like everything else, interacts with a number of other factors in word order. For example, there is a well-known influence of discourse status--recently mentioned referents tend to be produced earlier than novel referents (this is also referred to as the "given-before-new" preference). Length and discourse status can either simultaneously support the same word order or give rise to competing pressures. The question then becomes, how do speakers weight each of these considerations in arriving at a particular word order? Two papers that deal with the relationship between length- and discourse-driven factors in production are Arnold et al. (2000) for English and Choi (1997) for Korean. Finally, Gildea and Temperley (2008) take the typological end of Hawkins-style accounts a step further and draw on methods from computational linguistics to try to determine whether the grammars of natural languages are optimal systems for simultaneously minimizing numerous dependency lengths. The paper is very technical (from a computational linguistics journal), but you can get the gist from the introduction if you don't want to wade through all the details.

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2.3. Ambiguity Avoidance in Sentence Production

Syntactic ambiguities can lead to comprehension difficulty, e.g. in so called garden path sentences ("The horse raced past the barn fell"). One question that has received much attention in work on production is to what extent do people structure their utterances so as to avoid ambiguities? Put another way, do speakers structure their utterances in a way that eases production only, or do speakers also attempt to ease comprehension?

Evidence on this matter is equivocal. Arnold et al. (2004), for instance, find no evidence of ambiguity avoidance in a production experiment. Haywood et al. (2005), on the other hand, find evidence which supports strategic ambiguity avoidance, possibly due to a more ecological experimental procedure. Kraljic and Brennan (2005) provide evidence that prosodic cues to disambiguation are used by speakers, but that use of these cues is insensitive to the needs of the comprehender (they use prosody to disambiguate even when the context is completely disambiguating). These are all easy to read papers and the topic has fascinated many researchers (and maybe you?). It's interesting, in my experience, that people often have strong intuitions about the existence or lack of ambiguity avoidance (either side seems to hold strong believes). Consequently, this has been an active area of research with some great experiments (you will find many more references, in the articles mentioned above; for a quick discussion, you may also have a look at Jaeger, submitted, pages 22-23 and 30-31).

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2.4. Uniform Information Density

Uniform Information Density is a recently emerging account of language production (Jaeger, 2006; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Jaeger, submitted, in prep), according to which speakers' choices in production are driven by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal. Information is defined information theoretically (Shannon, 1948) with reference to probability distribution (the probable an event is the more information its occurrence carries).

Uniform Information Density has been tested against corpus data from phonetic reduction (Jaeger & Kidd, 2008; building on Bell et al., 2003, 2009), morpho-syntactic reduction (Frank & Jaeger, 2008), syntactic reduction (Jaeger, 2006, submitted, in prep; Levy & Jaeger, 2007), and against inter-clausal planning (Gomez Gallo et al., 2008). Data from the distribution of disfluencies and gestures has also been argued to be supporting the principle of Uniform Information Density (Cook et al., 2009).

Short introductions can be found in Levy and Jaeger (2007, rather technical) and Frank and Jaeger (2008). A more in-depth discussion in journal format is found in Jaeger (submitted).

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2.5. Psycholinguistic Corpus-based work on Syntactic Variation

For some examples, of corpus-based psycholinguistic research on syntactic production, see:

Bresnan et al. (2007) and Arnold et al. (2000) on the ditransitive alternation;
Wasow (1997) and Arnold et al. (2000) on heavy NP shift;
Lohse et al. (2004) on particle shift;
Roland et al. (2005) and Jaeger (submitted) on complementizer-mentioning;
Wasow et al. (in press) on relativizer-mentioning;
Jaeger (in prep) on passive subject-extracted relative clause reduction;
Frank and Jaeger (2008) on auxiliary contraction;

Example of a corpus-based approach using mixed logit models are given in Bresnan et al. (2007) and Jaeger (submitted).

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3. Sociolinguistic Corpus-based work on Syntactic Variation

While the focus of this course is on the use of corpora in addressing psycholinguistic questions, syntactic corpora have also been used to pursue questions of sociolinguistic interest. Tagliamonte et al. (2005), for example, have looked at relativizer (e.g. that) mentioning cross-dialectally. This is instructive for psycholinguistic accounts of similar phenomena because it shows that some of the observed variation may have a sociolinguistic rather than psycholinguistic explanation. Or perhaps more interestingly, that psycholinguistic principles may have a social dimension. Tagliamonte and Smith (2005) looks at complementizer mentioning. Both are very nice papers that are very easy to understand. Please try to read at least one of them.

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3.1. Grammaticization and Gradient Grammaticality in Syntactic Variation

A question of great interest to theoretical linguists (and some psycholinguists) concerns the nature of grammatical knowledge: is our knowledge of our native language(s) categorical in nature, fixed parametrically by environmental triggers during childhood, or is grammatical knowledge quantitative and gradient, arising gradually from experience with other speakers? Researchers who have promoted the latter view have drawn on corpus (and experimental) data to demonstrate that what linguists would call "grammatical" differences between dialects of a given language emerge over time as speakers gradually and probabilistically begin to prefer one of a set of equally well-formed variants. A nice example of this can be found in Bresnan and Hay (2007), and in Torres Cacoullos and Walker (2009). Interested readers may also want to look at Bresnan et al. (2007), which is mentioned in a few other sections on this reading list for its methodological sophistication.

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3.2. Semantic theories of variation

It should be mentioned that within linguistic work on variation, you often find the implicit or explicit assumption that there simply are no two forms with the same meaning (what Tom Wasow has sometimes called "paraphrase denial"). This idea is quite popular, probably because it corresponds well to our intuitions that generally language avoids having multiple forms with the same meaning (e.g. true synonyms). Examples of such work that makes this assumption quite explicit and applies it to phenomena that psycholinguists study as variation are, for example, Bolinger (1972), Dor (2005), and Yaguchi (2001) -- all on that-omission. See Kinsey et al. (2007) for a nice and short overview and an experiment that argues against such accounts of that-mentioning. Some reflections on this can also be found in my thesis (Chapter 1 contains a summary of semantic accounts; Chapter 6 contains a discussion). Discussion of and references to semantic accounts of word order variations can be found in Bresnan et al.'s (2007) introduction, where they provide data that argues against at least categorical semantic accounts.

An independent, though arguably related branch of work is the work on grammaticalization mentioned above (not all of it, but at least, Fox and Thompson, 2007; Thompson and Mulac 1991a, 1991b).

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3.3. Statistics for Corpus-based Research

Modern corpus-based research mostly employs multiple regression methods. Since corpus-based work usually involves clustered data (data from different speakers, different groups, etc.) the employed statistical methods need to somehow correct for the resulting violation of the assumption of independence. This can be done, for example, via bootstrapping or by means of multilevel (mixed) models.

Most papers on these models are still hard to read, but there are some pretty readable introductions to ordinary and multilevel regression methods for language researchers.

Baayen (2008) provides a selection of examples, case studies, and some conceptual background, along with tons of R code to run regression and mixed models on language data. You can download the book for free from his website. I personally really like Gelman and Hill (2006), which has a slightly Bayesian touch to it (in its interpretation and focus,) -- but even if you're not Bayesian, I think you will enjoy this book. The disadvantage of this book is that the examples do not come from linguistics. There are several additional R books that introduce you to regression. If you're interested, ask us for our recommendations.

Most research on syntactic production requires binomial or multinomial models (because the outcome we're analyzing are categorical). Jaeger (2008) provides an introduction to mixed logit models. Readable applications of such models to corpus data are found in Bresnan et al. (2007) and Jaeger (submitted; see also Jaeger, 2006).

A wonderful introduction to linear mixed models and model comparison over such models is found in Baayen et al. (2008).

For a discussion of statistics with respect specifically to sociolinguistic corpus research, have a look at Johnson (2009).

For further references and advanced tutorials, see our HLP lab stats course page and search the entries of the HLP lab blog. Also consider subscribing to the R-lang email list, a list specifically designed to help language researchers using R.

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