Conceptual and Grammatical Plurality of Conjoined NPs in L2 Sentence Comprehension

Conceptual and Grammatical Plurality of Conjoined NPs in L2 Sentence Comprehension

August 20, 2016 The 42nd JASELE Dokkyo University

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Overview• Introduction• Background• The Present Study• Results• Discussion

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Yu TAMURAGraduate School, Nagoya University Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

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• Mike and Tom are/*is going to help us.• Coordinate NPs = always plural? -> NO• It depends on the referent

• Harry and only Harry is/*are going to be allowed to read this.

• Pickles and ice cream is delicious.• Pickles and ice cream are delicious.

(Morgan, 1984, p.72)Semantic properties matter!

Number determination

6Background

• Always semantics win? -> NO• * There are a cat and a dog in the yard.• There is a cat and a dog in the yard.

• Native speakers of English tend to make the first conjunct agreement (Sobin, 1997)

Number determination is a mixture of syntax, morphology, and semantics

• In this study, I will use conceptual plurality to refer to the semantics of number.

Number determination

7Background

Mechanism for L1 Production

8Background

• Marking and Morphing (Bock, Eberhard, & Cutting, 2004)• Marking (Clause level procedure)

• conceptual number -> grammatical number

Subject -> plural

Subject -> singular


9Background

• Marking and Morphing (Bock, Eberhard, & Cutting, 2004)• Morphing (Phrase level procedure)

• Morphological number -> grammatical number

bananas

scissors

NP[plural]

NP[plural]


10Background

• Conceptual number and grammatical number sometimes differ • Scissors, tweezers, etc.

• Conceptually singular but grammatically plural• Family, audience, etc.

• Conceptually plural but grammatically singular• Conceptual number could override grammatical number (Humphreys & Bock, 2005; Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996)

• The two number marking processes are independent (Bock et al., 2004)

• Marking and Morphing approach works for L1 sentence comprehension too(Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009)

• Processing plural morphemes is difficult for L2 learners• They know the rule but can’t use it in online (Jiang,

2004, 2007, Jiang et al., 2011)• What is easier for L2 learners?• Syntactically denoted plurality (Shibuya &

Wakabayashi, 2008)• e.g., Tom and Mary

• Lexically denoted plurality (e.g., Jiang et al., 2015)• e.g., these books, several bags, two cats, many

apples

Processing Plurality in SLA

11Background

• Garden-path effects (Tamura et al., 2015)• (a) When the lovers kissed the boy played…• (b) When the boy and the girl kissed the boy played…• No garden-path effects in (b)

• L2 learners are capable of representing conjoined NPs as conceptually plural

• Is syntactically denoted plurality easier?• Shibuya and Wakabayashi (2008) only investigated over

the use of the third-person singular -s• e.g., Tom and Mary cook/*cooks…

Conceptual Plurality in L2 Comprehension

12Background

• Advanced L2 learners were able to utilize conceptual number information during production (Foote, 2010)

• Few studies investigated the role of conceptual number information during sentence comprehension (except Kusanagi, Tamura, Fukuta, 2015; Tamura et al., 2015)

Problems

13Background

Shouldn’t we examine conceptual number processing in L2 sentence comprehension?

• Number agreement between the conjoined NP and copula

• e.g., My mother and his father *is/are in New York City.• Two possibilities

• Conceptual plurality ◯ & Grammatical plurality ◯

• Conceptual plurality ◯ & Grammatical plurality ☓

Hypothesis

14Background

Focus of the present study


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• 32 Japanese undergraduate and graduate students• Identical to those who participated in Tamura et al.

(2015)

Participants

16The Present Study

n M SD Min Max skew kurtosis

Age 31 24.77 5.35 20 40 1.57 1.23

TOEIC 32 824.22 113.12 550 990 -0.61 -0.44

Study abroad (month) 18 11.36 13.28 0.5 54 1.89 3.28

Years of learning English

32 13.59 5.85 8 36 2.18 5.05

Starting age 31 11.03 4.66 2 25 1.02 2.47

Table 1. Demographic Information of the Participants

• Word by word self-paced reading task on PC• developed by Hot Soup Processor (ver 3.3.2)

Experiment

17The Present Study

__ ___ __ __ ___ _____ __ _____ ___ ____

The ____ __ __ ___ _____ __ _____ ___ ___

____ mother __ _____ __ _____ ___ ____

____ __ boy __ ___ _____ __ _____ ___ _______ __ boy __ ___ _____ __ _____ ___ ______ ____ __ _____ __ _____ ___ __ now. __

____ __ ___ __ ___ _____ __ _____ ___ 次へ

• 20 pairs of target sentences (DP and DP BE PP)• *The mother and his son is in the cottage now.• The mother and his son are in the cottage now.

• 68 distractor items• One-third of the distractor items was followed by

comprehension questions• Mean Accuracy of the comprehension questions

• 82.8% (SD = 11.4)• Two counterbalanced lists• Two sessions with a few minutes break

Materials

18The Present Study

• Outliers• Each participant’s means and SDs of RTs in each

condition were calculated• Responses above the Mean RTs +/- 3SD were

removed• Responses below 200ms were removed• Overall, 4.4% of all the responses were removed

Analysis

19The Present Study

• Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Model (GLMM) by R 3.3.0• Explanatory variables

• Agreement condition (2 levels)• singular or plural

•Covariate•The number of letters

•Response variables•Raw RTs

• Distribution family and link function• Inverse-Gaussian distribution and identity-link

Analysis

20The Present Study


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Reading Time Differences

22Results

father is/are in New York

sg 593 (194) 471 (113) 462 (134) 478 (134) 535 (153)

pl 570 (187) 486 (104) 434 (82) 441 (110) 519 (130)

Table 2. Mean RTs (ms) and SDs (parentheses) in each condition

Note. sg = singular; pl = plural


23Results


sg 593 (194) 471 (113) 462 (134) 478 (134) 535 (153)

pl 570 (187) 486 (104) 434 (82) 441 (110) 519 (130)

Table 2. Mean RTs (ms) and SDs (parentheses) in each condition

Note. sg = singular; pl = plural


24Results

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26Results

father is/are in

New YorkNote. Dotted lines are mean RTs

Region 4

27Results

Random effectsFixed effects By Subject By Items

Parameters Estimate SE t p SD SD

Intercept 617.34 37.55 16.44 <.001 91.73 43.11c.letters 16.33 7.98 2.05 .04 — —

Condition 7.30 19.93 0.37 .71 64.47 —

My mother and his father is/are in New York City.

Table 3. The Results of GLMM in Region 4

Region 5

28Results




Intercept 496.45 35.85 13.85 <.001 63.30 31.94c.letters -3.84 21.17 -0.18 .86 — —

Condition -21.50 27.15 -0.79 .43 26.39 45.39


Region 6

29Results




Intercept 509.78 24.21 21.06 <.001 53.88 22.49c.letters 25.88 7.08 3.66 <.001 — —

Condition 26.06 18.75 1.39 .16 63.72 —


Region 7

30Results




Intercept 500.70 24.41 20.51 <.001 60.61 31.34c.letters 30.63 8.09 3.79 <.001 — —

Condition 26.77 21.96 1.22 .22 77.49 —



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• No reading time differences between singular and plural agreement conditions in the target region

• No spill-over effects were found in Region 6 and 7

Summary of the Results

32Discussion

• The participants succeeded in using conceptual plurality in processing conjoined NP (Tamura et al., 2015)

• However, in this study• The same participants did not notice number

agreement mismatches (A and B *is/are….)• They failed to utilize grammatical number

Two Types of Plurality

33Discussion

Processing Mechanism

34Discussion

Tamura et al. (2015)

the boy and the girl

The Present Study

the boy and the girl [plural]

Discussion

Temporal comprehension processing model

[My mother and his father]

NP NPand

ConjP

NP[ ]Subject

Object

pl

MESSAGE

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• Questions remained unsolved • Can L2 learners of English extract conceptual

plurality from morphological plurality?• bananas ->

• Can L2 learners of English extract conceptual plurality from morphological plurality if lexical support is provided?

• these bananas ->

Future Directions

36Discussion

Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., & Cutting, J. C. (2004). Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 251–278. doi10.1016/j.jml.2004.04.005

Foote, R. (2010). Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 99–118. doi:10.1017/S136672890999040X

Humphreys, K. R., & Bock, K. (2005). Notional number agreement in English. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 689–95. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16447383

Jiang, N. (2004). Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 603–634. doi:10.1017/S0142716404001298

Jiang, N. (2007). Selective integration of linguistic knowledge in adult second language learning. Language Learning, 57, 1–33. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2007.00397.x

Jiang, N., Hu, G., Chrabaszcz, A., & Ye, L. (2015). The activation of grammaticalized meaning in L2 processing: Toward an explanation of the morphological congruency effect. International Journal of Bilingualism. Advance Online Publication doi:10.1177/1367006915603823

Kusanagi, K., Tamura, Y., & Fukuta, J. (2015). The notional number attraction in English as a foreign language: A self-paced reading study. Journal of the Japan Society for Speech Sciences, 16, 77–96.

Morgan, J. L. (1984). Some problems of determination in English number agreement. In Proceedings of the Eastern States conference on linguistics (pp. 69–78). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.

Shibuya, M., & Wakabayashi, S. (2008). Why are L2 learners not always sensitive to subject-verb agreement? EUROSLA Yearbook, 8, 235–258. doi:10.1075/eurosla.8.13shi

Sobin, N. (1997). Agreement, default rules, and grammatical viruses. Linguistic Inquiry, 28, 318–343. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4178979

Tamura, Y., Fukuta, J., Nishimura, Y., Harada, Y., Hara, K., & Kato, D. (2015). Conceptual plurality in Japanese EFL learners’ online sentence processing: A case of garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs. Paper presented at the 41st Annual Conference of the Japan Society of English Language Education (JASELE 2015). Kumamoto, Japan.

Vigliocco, G., Hartsuiker, R. J., Jarema, G., & Kolk, H. H. (1996). One or more labels on the bottles? Notional concord in Dutch and French. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 407–442. doi:10.1080/016909696387169

Wagers, M. W., Lau, E. F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 206–237. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.04.002

37References

Conceptual and Grammatical Plurality of Conjoined NPs in L2 Sentence Comprehension

contact info Yu TamuraGraduate School, Nagoya [email protected]://www.tamurayu.wordpress.com/

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• Conceptual Plurality ◯

• Grammatical Plurality ☓

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.tamurayu.wordpress.com

Conceptual and Grammatical Plurality of Conjoined NPs in L2 Sentence Comprehension

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