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Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments. We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies.

The goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., Sprouse et al. 2012) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis of island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VP-ellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase being elided, here argued to be vP; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow syntactic features to be separated from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate.

Objectives To examine the effect of the physical layout of the street network on the spatial distribution of outdoor serious violence. Crime pattern theory predicts crime would be more prevalent on more connected, accessible or traveled street segments, as these will be more likely to fall within an offender’s awareness space. Methods The distribution of incidents of outdoor murder, attempted murder and other near-lethal violent crimes that occurred in one London (UK) borough (N = 447 offenses) was analyzed. The space syntax methodology was used to estimate the to- and through-movement potential of individual street segments. Results Regression analyses showed higher levels of integration (a measure of to-movement potential) and choice (through-movement potential) were associated with greater odds of a street segment containing at least one crime. Risk was also higher for segments located near to segments with the highest global choice values. In contrast, connectivity (the number of other segments a street segment is adjacent to) was negatively associated with crime occurrence. Conclusions As predicted, the configuration of the street network was associated with the spatial distribution of outdoor serious violence. Crime reduction measures should be targeted at high-choice street segments (typically main arteries) and segments nearby.

The paper explores how syntax influences the mapping of clitics to the prosodic structure in a dialect of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) that allows accent shift from nouns and adjectives to proclitics. I show that clitics preceding hosts of different morphological and syntactic complexity in the output of the syntax map to prosody differently. I establish a new correlation between the accent shift and the syntactic mobility of the host. Specifically, in a number of cases with adjectival hosts, accent can shift from the adjective to the proclitic preceding it only if the adjective is able to separate from the noun it modifies. I argue that prepositions in BCS cliticize to their host in the syntax in an upward fashion. I extend this analysis to a number of cases where non-constituents appear to be undergoing syntactic movement in BCS. The proposed analysis of cliticization also has important ramifications for the theory of phases and Abels's (2003a) generalization that complements of phasal heads cannot move. I show that it explains away several cases where phasal complements appear to be moving out of phases in contexts with clitics, removing several potential problems for the phase-based system.

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

In sentence processing, semantic and syntactic violations elicit differential brain responses observable in event-related potentials: An N400 signals semantic violations, whereas a P600 marks inconsistent syntactic structure. Does the brain register similar distinctions in scene perception? To address this question, we presented participants with semantic inconsistencies, in which an object was incongruent with a scene's meaning, and syntactic inconsistencies, in which an object violated structural rules. We found a clear dissociation between semantic and syntactic processing: Semantic inconsistencies produced negative deflections in the N300-N400 time window, whereas mild syntactic inconsistencies elicited a late positivity resembling the P600 found for syntactic inconsistencies in sentence processing. Extreme syntactic violations, such as a hovering beer bottle defying gravity, were associated with earlier perceptual processing difficulties reflected in the N300 response, but failed to produce a P600 effect. We therefore conclude that different neural populations are active during semantic and syntactic processing of scenes, and that syntactically impossible object placements are processed in a categorically different manner than are syntactically resolvable object misplacements.

Human language stands out in the natural world as a biological signal that uses a structured system to combine the meanings of small linguistic units (e.g., words) into larger constituents (e.g., phrases and sentences). However, the physical dynamics of speech (or sign) do not stand in a one-to-one relationship with the meanings listeners perceive. Instead, listeners infer meaning based on their knowledge of the language. The neural readouts of the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying these inferences are still poorly understood. In the present study, we used scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to compare the neural response to phrases (e.g., the red vase) and sentences (e.g., the vase is red), which were close in semantic meaning and had been synthesized to be physically indistinguishable. Differences in structure were well captured in the reorganization of neural phase responses in delta (approximately <2 Hz) and theta bands (approximately 2 to 7 Hz),and in power and power connectivity changes in the alpha band (approximately 7.5 to 13.5 Hz). Consistent with predictions from a computational model, sentences showed more power, more power connectivity, and more phase synchronization than phrases did. Theta–gamma phase–amplitude coupling occurred, but did not differ between the syntactic structures. Spectral–temporal response function (STRF) modeling revealed different encoding states for phrases and sentences, over and above the acoustically driven neural response. Our findings provide a comprehensive description of how the brain encodes and separates linguistic structures in the dynamics of neural responses. They imply that phase synchronization and strength of connectivity are readouts for the constituent structure of language. The results provide a novel basis for future neurophysiological research on linguistic structure representation in the brain, and, together with our simulations, support time-based binding as a mechanism of structure encoding in neural dynamics.

People comprehend utterances rapidly and without conscious effort. Traditional theories assume that sentence processing is algorithmic and that meaning is derived compositionally. The language processor is believed to generate representations of the linguistic input that are complete, detailed, and accurate. However, recent findings challenge these assumptions. Investigations of the misinterpretation of both garden-path and passive sentences have yielded support for the idea that the meaning people obtain for a sentence is often not a reflection of its true content. Moreover, incorrect interpretations may persist even after syntactic reanalysis has taken place. Our good-enough approach to language comprehension hold that language processing is sometimes only partial and that semantic representations are often incomplete. Future work will elucidate the conditions under which sentence processing is simply good enough.

There is much debate in the linguistic literature about what mechanisms are responsible for accessing, implementing, and restricting grammatical competition. Building on this line of research, this article explores competition between plural and singular marking in Western Armenian, a language where grammatical competition results in a restricted interpretation of singular nouns. Of interest to competition theories in general, this restriction only occurs in certain grammatical environments: namely, definite NPs. As argued here, an adequate treatment of these facts requires comparing utterances in terms of their syntactic complexity (as Katzir (2007) proposes).