title: Listeners Exploit Syntactic Structure On-Line to Restrict Their Lexical Search to a Subclass of Verbs.
abstract: Many experiments have shown that listeners actively build expectations about up-coming words, rather than simply waiting for information to accumulate. The online construction of a syntactic structure is one of the cues that listeners may use to construct strong expectations about the possible words they will be exposed to. For example, speakers of verb-final languages use pre-verbal arguments to predict on-line the kind of arguments that are likely to occur next (e.g., Kamide, 2008, for a review). Although in SVO languages information about a verb's arguments typically follows the verb, some languages use pre-verbal object pronouns, potentially allowing listeners to build on-line expectations about the nature of the upcoming verb. For instance, if a pre-verbal direct object pronoun is heard, then the following verb has to be able to enter a transitive structure, thus excluding intransitive verbs. To test this, we used French, in which object pronouns have to appear pre-verbally, to investigate whether listeners use this cue to predict the occurrence of a transitive verb. In a word detection task, we measured the number of false alarms to sentences that contained a transitive verb whose first syllable was homophonous to the target monosyllabic verb (e.g., target "dort" /dɔʁ/ to sleep and false alarm verb "dorlote" /dɔʁlɔt/ to cuddle). The crucial comparison involved two sentence types, one without a pre-verbal object clitic, for which an intransitive verb was temporarily a plausible option (e.g., "Il dorlote" / He cuddles) and the other with a pre-verbal object clitic, that made the appearance of an intransitive verb impossible ("Il le dorlote" / He cuddles it). Results showed a lower rate of false alarms for sentences with a pre-verbal object pronoun (3%) compared to locally ambiguous sentences (about 20%). Participants rapidly incorporate information about a verb's argument structure to constrain lexical access to verbs that match the expected subcategorization frame.
authors.affiliation: Language, Cognition and Development Lab, Cognitive Neuroscience Department, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati Trieste, Italy ; Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, France.
authors.forename: Perrine
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Brusini
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, France ; Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes Paris, France.
authors.forename: Mélanie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brun
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, France ; Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University Paris, France.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Brunet
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, France ; Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University Paris, France.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Christophe
keywords: lexical search; linguistic expectation; on-line syntactic structure construction; verb argument structure