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The Development of Language Processing Strategies: A Cross-linguistic Study Between Japanese and English
Ever since the notion of explanatory adequacy was promoted by Chomsky in his 1965 Aspects, linguists and psycholinguists have been in pursuit of a psychologically valid theory of grammar. To be explanatorily adequate, a theory of grammar can not only describe the general characteristics of a language but can also account for the underlying psychological processes of acquiring and processing that language. To be considered psychologically valid, a grammar must be learnable by ordinary children (the problem of acquisition) and must generate sentences that are parsable by ordinary people (the problem of processing). Ultimately, the fields of language acquisition and processing are concerned with the same to build a theory that accounts for grammar as it is acquired by children; accessed in comprehension and production of speech; and represented within the human mind. Unfortunately, these two fields developed independently and have rarely been well-informed about each other's concerns. Both have experienced past difficulties as a result.
Recently, new models have been developed with full consideration to cross-linguistic diversity. Gone are many of the basic assumptions of conventional models, and in their place a variety of innovative and more flexible assumptions have emerged. However, in their attempt to address cross-linguistic issues, these processing models have yet to fully address the developmental How can a child without a stable grammar process language and still manage to acquire new grammar?
This book attempts to develop a model of language processing that addresses both cross-linguistic and developmental challenges. It proposes to link the setting of a basic configurational parameter during language acquisition to the different organization of processing strategies in left- and right-branching languages. Based primarily on Mazuka's doctoral dissertation, this volume incorporates various responses to the original proposal as well as the author's responses to the comments.
Recently, new models have been developed with full consideration to cross-linguistic diversity. Gone are many of the basic assumptions of conventional models, and in their place a variety of innovative and more flexible assumptions have emerged. However, in their attempt to address cross-linguistic issues, these processing models have yet to fully address the developmental How can a child without a stable grammar process language and still manage to acquire new grammar?
This book attempts to develop a model of language processing that addresses both cross-linguistic and developmental challenges. It proposes to link the setting of a basic configurational parameter during language acquisition to the different organization of processing strategies in left- and right-branching languages. Based primarily on Mazuka's doctoral dissertation, this volume incorporates various responses to the original proposal as well as the author's responses to the comments.
168 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1998
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January 4, 2012
I give this book 4 stars because I had to skim a lot to get to the good stuff. This is basically an updated version of her PHD thesis. This book is a significant work on human sentence processing involving data from a head final and a head initial language.
Mazuka presents data on sentence processing experiments with English speaking adults and Japanese speaking children and adults. She shows that sentence processing strategies are the same in children and adults (though their ability differs with age), and that sentence processing strategies differ cross-linguistically. Her experimental data include probe latency tasks (PLTs) for lexical and semantic information in English and Japanese sentences.
A probe latency task involves a subject listening to a sentence and responding to questions about its contents. In lexical PLT, a subject is asked if the sentence contained the specified lexical item. In semantic PLT, the subject is asked if a sentence contained a portion which has a similar meaning to a specified word or phrase. The experimenter then carefully designs sentences which test the subjects' ability to process different types of sentences. Mazuka's experiment measure response time and also the accuracy of the subjects' responses. Her findings for cross-linguistic processing differences are as follows:
English speakers showed processing differences for main and subordinate clauses, while Japanese speakers did not.
English speakers showed different effects for semantic and lexical tasks, while Japanese speakers did not.
In English speakers, response time for semantic probe latency tasks involving sentence-initial subordinate clauses (an LB structure) was increased, while in Japanese speakers it was greatly decreased.
Japanese speaker response times to both lexical and semantic PLTs involving left-branching and coordinate structures were the same; English speakers showed much larger recency effects in LB than coordinate sentences.
Hypotheses about the human language processing mechanism which assume a single processing strategy do not account for these data. Japanese speakers process LB structures efficiently, and English speakers process RB structures efficiently. This is impossible in a parser which assumes only one processing strategy, and a parser which can efficiently process both would be too powerful to account for real human data. For Japanese speakers to process LB structures as efficiently as English speakers do RB structures, processing must be done bottom-up instead of top-down. Mazuka therefore hypothesizes that Universal Grammar (UG) contains a parameter which determines whether a language is right- or left-branching (RB or LB), and that this is linked with the processing strategy by specifying whether processing should be done top-down or bottom-up. She also hypothesizes that in English, main and subordinate clauses are processed to a different semantic level at some initial encoding stage, accounting differences in English main and subordinate clause PLT tasks. This needs to be further tested in the future with PLTs involving two clause sentences beginning with an explicit subordinator in Japanese.
She states that future research is required to determine the exact relationship between her experimental data and the operation of the human sentence parser as she has hypothesized.
Since some languages such as German, actually branch in different directions for different types of clauses, her hypothesis needs to be revised to account for this. I'm hoping that her hypotheses can be tested in detail in some sort of a cogntive modeling system.
Mazuka presents data on sentence processing experiments with English speaking adults and Japanese speaking children and adults. She shows that sentence processing strategies are the same in children and adults (though their ability differs with age), and that sentence processing strategies differ cross-linguistically. Her experimental data include probe latency tasks (PLTs) for lexical and semantic information in English and Japanese sentences.
A probe latency task involves a subject listening to a sentence and responding to questions about its contents. In lexical PLT, a subject is asked if the sentence contained the specified lexical item. In semantic PLT, the subject is asked if a sentence contained a portion which has a similar meaning to a specified word or phrase. The experimenter then carefully designs sentences which test the subjects' ability to process different types of sentences. Mazuka's experiment measure response time and also the accuracy of the subjects' responses. Her findings for cross-linguistic processing differences are as follows:
English speakers showed processing differences for main and subordinate clauses, while Japanese speakers did not.
English speakers showed different effects for semantic and lexical tasks, while Japanese speakers did not.
In English speakers, response time for semantic probe latency tasks involving sentence-initial subordinate clauses (an LB structure) was increased, while in Japanese speakers it was greatly decreased.
Japanese speaker response times to both lexical and semantic PLTs involving left-branching and coordinate structures were the same; English speakers showed much larger recency effects in LB than coordinate sentences.
Hypotheses about the human language processing mechanism which assume a single processing strategy do not account for these data. Japanese speakers process LB structures efficiently, and English speakers process RB structures efficiently. This is impossible in a parser which assumes only one processing strategy, and a parser which can efficiently process both would be too powerful to account for real human data. For Japanese speakers to process LB structures as efficiently as English speakers do RB structures, processing must be done bottom-up instead of top-down. Mazuka therefore hypothesizes that Universal Grammar (UG) contains a parameter which determines whether a language is right- or left-branching (RB or LB), and that this is linked with the processing strategy by specifying whether processing should be done top-down or bottom-up. She also hypothesizes that in English, main and subordinate clauses are processed to a different semantic level at some initial encoding stage, accounting differences in English main and subordinate clause PLT tasks. This needs to be further tested in the future with PLTs involving two clause sentences beginning with an explicit subordinator in Japanese.
She states that future research is required to determine the exact relationship between her experimental data and the operation of the human sentence parser as she has hypothesized.
Since some languages such as German, actually branch in different directions for different types of clauses, her hypothesis needs to be revised to account for this. I'm hoping that her hypotheses can be tested in detail in some sort of a cogntive modeling system.
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October 25, 2012I picked up this book after reading the introduction and the first chapter.
It sounded more like an essay than a book, but I was really interested in what I thought she was getting at with her thesis. I think the idea was that studies of how language is parsed by children and adults has only been in right-branching languages like English. The problem for me as a student of Japanese is that it's a left-branching language. For example in English: "He went to the store"; Japanese: "He Store to Went". It's not so bad for simple sentences, and those are natural to me now, but for complex sentences, I often have to stop and think. If it's spoken, I don't really have time to stop and think. So that the author was going to take a look at how left-branching languages are processed by the brain was very interesting to me.
My hope was to understand how native speakers parse sentences, so I could actively try to copy them until it became more natural. Unfortunately, the book quickly became inaccessible to me as the terms and diagrams require a background in linguistics.
Google and linguistics.stackexchange.com, are big helps for anyone who has the motivation to learn some topics in linguistics, but I didn't.
Going to have to put this essay down.
It sounded more like an essay than a book, but I was really interested in what I thought she was getting at with her thesis. I think the idea was that studies of how language is parsed by children and adults has only been in right-branching languages like English. The problem for me as a student of Japanese is that it's a left-branching language. For example in English: "He went to the store"; Japanese: "He Store to Went". It's not so bad for simple sentences, and those are natural to me now, but for complex sentences, I often have to stop and think. If it's spoken, I don't really have time to stop and think. So that the author was going to take a look at how left-branching languages are processed by the brain was very interesting to me.
My hope was to understand how native speakers parse sentences, so I could actively try to copy them until it became more natural. Unfortunately, the book quickly became inaccessible to me as the terms and diagrams require a background in linguistics.
Google and linguistics.stackexchange.com, are big helps for anyone who has the motivation to learn some topics in linguistics, but I didn't.
Going to have to put this essay down.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews