Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T01:08:37.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sensitivity to syntactic violation and semantic ambiguity in English modal verbs: A self-paced reading study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2020

Nadia Mifka-Profozic Open the ORCID record for Nadia Mifka-Profozic [Opens in a new window] ,
David O’Reilly Open the ORCID record for David O’Reilly [Opens in a new window]  and
Juan Guo
Nadia Mifka-Profozic*
Affiliation:
University of York
David O’Reilly
Affiliation:
University of York
Juan Guo
Affiliation:
Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present study is, to our knowledge, the first self-paced reading experiment to investigate the effects of syntactic violation and semantic ambiguity on processing English modal auxiliaries. Forty undergraduate students, native speakers of English, took part in the study and read 36 target sentences, each containing a modal verb in context. Two of the most frequent English modals, can and may, were used in three distinct categories of modal expression: agent-oriented/ability, epistemic possibility, and speaker-oriented/permission. The two modal auxiliaries were manipulated such that they were either congruent or incongruent with the context, or in the case of permission felicitous or infelicitous relative to the context. We found that incongruent modal use in an agent-oriented context resulted in a reading penalty that was observed in a spillover on the segments following the modal and the lexical verb. Incongruent modal use to express epistemic possibility significantly affected reading times immediately after the modal auxiliary, and also spilt over to the following segments. Reading times in sentences expressing speaker-oriented modality were not affected by inconsistency in the use of the modal verb unmarked for formality in a formal context. The substantive and methodological implications of findings are discussed.

Keywords

processingself-paced readingmodal auxiliariesepistemicagent-oriented
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2020 , pp. 1017 - 1043
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altmann, G. T. M., & Steedman, M. J. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, 191–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bartoń, K. (2018). MuMIn: Multi-Model Inference. R package version 1.42.1. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MuMIn/index.html Google Scholar
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1989). Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language, 65(38), 487–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd. Google Scholar
Brown, C., & Hagoort, P. (2006). On the electrophysiology of language comprehension: Implications for the human language system. In Crocker, M. W., Pickering, M. J., & Clifton, C. (Eds.), Architectures and mechanisms for language processing (pp. 213–237). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J, Perkins, R., and Pagliuca, W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar
Coates, J. (1980). On the non-equivalence of may and can. Lingua, 50(3), 209–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(80)90026-1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, J. (2014). The semantics of modal auxiliaries. Routledge. Google Scholar
Crocker, M. W., Pickering, M. J., & Clifton, C. (2006). Architectures and mechanisms for language processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Cunnings, I., & Finlayson, I. (2015). Mixed effects modeling and longitudinal data analysis. In Plonsky, L. (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 159–181). New York: Routledge. CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Facchinetti, R., Krug, M. G., & Palmer, F. R. (2003). Modality in contemporary English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. (1999). Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis. Google Scholar
Giskes, A. (2018). The online processing of epistemic modal verbs during language comprehension. An ERP study (Unpublished MA thesis).Google Scholar
Hagoort, P. (2003). Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combining syntactic semantic violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(6), 883–899.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hagoort, P., Brown, C. M., & Groothusen, J. (1993). The syntactic positive shift (SPS) as an ERP-measure of syntactic processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 439–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hahne, A., & Frederici, A.D. (2002). Differential task effects on semantic and syntactic processes as revealed by ERPs. Cognitive Brain Research, 13(3), 339–356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haigh, M., Stewart, A., & Connell, L. (2013). Reasoning as we read: Establishing the probability of causal conditionals. Memory and Cognition, 41(1), 152–158.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopp, H. (2006). Syntactic features and reanalysis in near-native processing. Second Language Research, 22, 369–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2016). The timing of lexical and syntactic processes in second language sentence comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(5), 1253–1280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, R. D. (1976). Some theoretical issues in the description of the English verb. Lingua, 40, 331–383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huette, S., Matlock, T., & Spivey, M. J. (2010). The online processing of modal verbs: Parallel activation of competing mental models. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 32(32), 1154–1159.Google Scholar
Jegerski, J. (2012). The processing of subject–object ambiguities in native and near-native Mexican Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(4), 721–735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jegerski, J. (2014). Self-paced reading. In Jegerski, J. & VanPatten, B. (Eds.). Research methods in second language psycholinguistics (pp. 20–49). New York: Routledge. Google Scholar
Jegerski, J. (2016). Number attraction effects in near-native Spanish sentence comprehension. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(1), 5–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P., & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading Comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology, General, 111(2), 228– 238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keating, G., & Jegerski, J. (2015). Experimental designs in sentence processing research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37(1), 1–32. https://doi:org/10.1017/S0272263114000187 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, A., & Osterhout, L. (2005). The independence of combinatory semantic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Memory and Language, 52(2), 205–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuperberg, G. R. (2007). Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax, Brain Research, 1146, 23–49. https://doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.12.063 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuperberg, G. R., Holcomb, P., Sitnikova, T., Greve, D., Dale, A. M., & Caplan, D. (2003). Distinct patterns of neural modulation during the processing of conceptual and syntactic anomalies. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(2), 272–293.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leech, G. (2003). Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In Facchinetti, R., Krug, M. G. & Palmer, F. R. (eds.), Modality in contemporary English (pp. 223–240). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Marinis, T. (2003). Psycholinguistic techniques in second language acquisition research. Second Language Research, 19(2), 144–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsden, E., Thompson, S., & Plonsky, L. (2018). A methodological synthesis of self-paced reading in second language research. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(5), 861–904. https://doi:10.1017/S0142716418000036 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McManus, K., & Marsden, E. (2018). Signatures of automaticity during practice: Explicit instruction about L1 processing routines can improve L2 grammatical processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 40(1), 205–234. https://doi:10.1017/S0142716418000553 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeish, D. (2018). Thanks coefficient alpha, we’ll take it from here. Psychological Methods, 23(3), 412–433. https://doi:10.1037/met0000144 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mifka-Profozic, N. (2017). Processing epistemic modality in a second language: A self-paced reading study. IRAL International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 55(3), 245–264. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2017-0107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molinaro, N., Barber, H. A., & Carreiras, M. (2011). Grammatical agreement processing in reading: ERP findings and future directions. Cortex, 47(8), 908–930.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Myers, J. L., & O’Brien, E. J. (1998). Accessing the discourse representation during reading. Discourse Processes, 26, 131–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78(2), 165–188.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O’Brien, E. J., Rizella, M. L., Albrecht, J. E., & Halleran, J. G. (1998). Updating a situation model: A memory-based text processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 24(5), 1200–1210.Google ScholarPubMed
Ozturk, O., & Papafragou, A. (2015). The acquisition of epistemic modality: From semantic meaning to pragmatic interpretation. Language Learning and Development, 11(3), 191–214. https://doi:10.1080/15475441.2014.905169 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1986). Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1990). Modality and the English modals. 2nd ed. London: Longman. Google Scholar
Palmer, F. (2003). Modality in English: Theoretical, descriptive and typological issues. In Facchinetti, R., Krug, M., & Palmer, F. (Eds.), Modality in contemporary English (pp. 1–17). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar
Papafragou, A. (1998). The acquisition of modality: Implications for theories of semantic representation. Mind and Language, 13, 370–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papafragou, A., & Ozturk, O. (2006). Children’s acquisition of epistemic modality. Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Peirce, J. W. (2007). PsychoPy—Psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 162(1–2), 8–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peirce, J. W. (2009). Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2(10). doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.010.2008Google ScholarPubMed
Peters, G.-J., Verbook, P., & Green, J. (2018). UserFriendlyScience: Quantitative analysis made accessible. R package version 0.7.2. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/userfriendlyscience/index.html Google Scholar
Pliatskias, C., & Marinis, T. (2013). Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly proficient second language learners of English: A self-paced reading study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 943–970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plonsky, L., & Derrick, D. (2016). A meta-analysis of reliability coefficients in second language research. The Modern Language Journal, 100(2), 538–553.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plonsky, L., & Ghanbar, H. (2018). Multiple regression in L2 research: A methodological synthesis and guide to interpreting R2 values. The Modern Language Journal, 102(4), 713–731.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plonsky, L., & Oswald, F. L. (2017). Multiple regression as a flexible alternative to ANOVA in L2 research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 39(3), 579–592.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portner, P. (2009). Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
Raykov, T., & Marcoulides, G. A.. (2019). Thanks coefficient alpha, we still need you! Educational and Psychological Measurement, 79(1), 200–210.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
R Core Team. (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing). https://www.R-project.org/ Google Scholar
Revelle, W. (2018). Using R and the psych package to find ω. http://personality-project.org/r/psych/HowTo/omega.pdf Google Scholar
Roberts, L., & Felser, C. (2011). Plausibility and recovery from garden paths in second language sentence processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 32(2), 299–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, L., & Liszka, S. (2013). Processing tense/aspect agreement violations online in the second language: A self-paced reading study with French and German L2 learners of English. Second Language Research, 413–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, A. J., Haigh, M. Kidd, E. (2009a). An investigation into the online processing of counterfactual and indicative conditionals. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 62(11), 2113–2125. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210902973106 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stewart, A. J., Kidd, E. and Haigh, M. (2009b). Early sensitivity to discourse-level anomalies: Evidence from self-paced reading. Discourse Processes, 46(1), 46–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638530802629091 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science, 2, 49–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, E. (1989). On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language, 65(1), 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, E. C., & Dasher, R. B. (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & Warren, T. (2010). Beginning adult L2 learners’ sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations: A self-paced reading study. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 22(7), 1092–1106. https://doi.org/10.1080/09541440903325178 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, B. (2020). Statistics for linguistics: An introduction using R. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar