Franck Julie, Colonna Saveria, Rizzi Luigi
Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - University of Paris 8 Paris, France.
Front Psychol. 2015 Apr 10;6:349. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00349. eCollection 2015.
We report three experiments on French that explore number mismatch effects in intervention configurations in the comprehension of object A'-dependencies, relative clauses and questions. The study capitalizes on the finding of object attraction in sentence production, in which speakers sometimes erroneously produce a verb that agrees in number with a plural object in object relative clauses. Evidence points to the role of three critical constructs from formal syntax: intervention, intermediate traces and c-command (Franck et al., 2010). Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading procedure on these grammatical structures with an agreement error on the verb, shows an enhancing effect of number mismatch in intervention configurations, with faster reading times with plural (mismatching) objects. Experiment 2, using an on-line grammaticality judgment task on the ungrammatical versions of these structures, shows an interference effect in the form of attraction, with slower response times with plural objects. Experiment 3 with a similar grammaticality judgment task shows stronger attraction from c-commanding than from preceding interveners. Overall, the data suggest that syntactic computations in performance refer to the same syntactic representations in production and comprehension, but that different tasks tap into different processes involved in parsing: whereas performance in self-paced reading reflects the intervention of the subject in the process of building an object A'-dependency, performance in grammaticality judgment reflects intervention of the object on the computation of the subject-verb agreement dependency. The latter shows the hallmarks of structure-dependent attraction effects in sentence production, in particular, a sensitivity to specific characteristics of hierarchical representations.
我们报告了三项关于法语的实验，这些实验探讨了在理解宾语A'-依存关系、关系从句和疑问句的干预结构中数字不匹配效应。该研究利用了句子生成中宾语吸引的发现，即说话者有时会错误地生成一个与宾语关系从句中的复数宾语在数上一致的动词。证据指向形式句法中三个关键结构的作用：干预、中间语迹和成分统领（弗兰克等人，2010）。实验1使用自定步速阅读程序处理这些语法结构，动词存在一致错误，结果显示在干预结构中数字不匹配有增强效应，复数（不匹配）宾语的阅读时间更快。实验2对这些结构的不符合语法的版本使用在线语法判断任务，结果显示出以吸引形式出现的干扰效应，复数宾语的反应时间更慢。实验3使用类似的语法判断任务，结果显示成分统领比前位干预者产生更强的吸引作用。总体而言，数据表明，语言运用中的句法计算在生成和理解中涉及相同的句法表征，但不同任务涉及到句法分析中不同的过程：自定步速阅读中的表现反映了主语在构建宾语A'-依存关系过程中的干预，而语法判断中的表现反映了宾语对主谓一致依存关系计算的干预。后者显示了句子生成中结构依赖吸引效应的特征，特别是对层次表征特定特征的敏感性。
