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Papers by Teeranoot Siriwittayakorn

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Oct 20, 2017

In typological literature, there has been disagreement as to whether there should be distinction ... more In typological literature, there has been disagreement as to whether there should be distinction between relative clauses (RCs) and nominal sentential complements (NSCs) in pro-drop languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Khmer and Thai. In pro-drop languages, nouns can be dropped when its reference can be retrieved from context. Therefore, what has been defined as a gap in RCs (i.e., the controversial element hereafter) and has often been used for differentiating RCs from NSCs might actually be a zero pronoun, making syntactic structures of RC and NSCs indistinguishable. This article reviews the study of the processing of RC attachment in Thai and discusses how its results provide preliminary evidence supporting that RCs and NSCs in Thai are syntactically different constructions and the controversial element in RCs is not a zero pronoun. The article suggests a new promising tool for investigating an unresolved typological problem. Keywords Typology • Relative clauses • Gap • Zero pronoun • Relative clause attachment Traditional Analyses: Syntactic Distinction Between RCs and NSCs Strings of words that function to give information about the head noun are often categorized either as relative clauses (RCs) as in (1) or nominal sentential complements (NSCs) as in (2). In this article, what will be referred to as traditional analyses is analyses that distinguish RCs from NSCs. For the traditional analyses, the presence of a gap (Comrie 1998) and the well-formedness of the clause (Kullavanijaya 2010, p. 60) are often adopted syntactic criteria to differentiate RCs from NSCs. RCs are claimed to contain a gap, making the clause incomplete as one of the arguments is extracted. The structure of NSCs on the other hand is the same as that of well-formed sentences. In English and European languages, the syntactic distinction between B Teeranoot Siriwittayakorn

Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, Dec 1, 2014

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent... more In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one. Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We reinterpret previous proposals to suggest that a language favors the non-local noun if it passes at least one of two tests. (1) Modifiers can intervene between noun and relative clause. (2) Adverbs can intervene between transitive verb and direct object.

We adopt experience-based accounts' techniques in investigating the processing of relative cl... more We adopt experience-based accounts' techniques in investigating the processing of relative clauses that can modify either of two nouns in Thai (e.g., "the coach of the runner that is good at drawing") with the aim to understand the nature of experience in sentence comprehension. Two issues are addressed. Firstly, we investigate whether experience with a construction with identical surface word order, namely nominal sentential complements, can affect the processing of relative clauses. Secondly, we investigate whether previously-reported effects of experience in sentence processing reflect general learning that can change participants' preferences or whether it only reflects strategic learning that helps participants perform better in a specific situation.We report a corpus count showing that local attachment (e.g., attaching the relative clause to "the runner") is more frequent than non-local attachment (e.g., attaching the relative clause to "the co...

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2018

Expectation is known to have an impact on behavioral choices of human beings by intensifying the ... more Expectation is known to have an impact on behavioral choices of human beings by intensifying the perception of something or distracting their attention away. However, little is known about how unexpected situations affect information processing. This study investigated the processing of possibility hedges. Specifically, it tested whether participants ignored possibility hedges when processing medical diagnoses and medical advice that contradicted their expectation. The results suggested that possibility hedges used in sentences did not affect the degree of participants’ surprise when reading unexpected text continuations. However, it was found that although participants paid attention to possibility hedges when asked to rate credibility of the texts, they paid attention to the hedges to a varying degree depending on whether situations mentioned in the text turned out to be better or worse than expected. The study added to the body of literature in information processing that unexpec...

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent... more In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one.� Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We reinterpret previous proposals to suggest that ...

We report a reading-time experiment investigating how native Thai speakers process sentences with... more We report a reading-time experiment investigating how native Thai speakers process sentences with subject-verb number agreement in English as a second language. Participants were slower to read sentences containing agreement violations, in a manner similar to what has been reported for native English speakers. The results add to a growing literature according to which learners can acquire knowledge of number agreement even if their native language lacks it. This suggests that learners are not constrained by the features available in their native languages, and are able to acquire new features and put this knowledge to use when reading sentences for content.

Since the early 1990s, there has been a debate on the universality of locality in sentence proces... more Since the early 1990s, there has been a debate on the universality of locality in sentence processing (i.e., the preference to associate a word or phrase to the closest possible word). Studies across various languages have investigated ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns to determine the types of languages in which locality is violated. We report a corpus count and a questionnaire in Thai indicating that intra-sentential contexts can obscure locality. Two reading experiments controlling for context are also reported in support of locality in Thai. The finding that context distorted locality raises the possibility that previous reports of locality violations in various languages may be reduced to contextual effects.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Oct 20, 2017

Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, Dec 1, 2014

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2018

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent... more In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one.� Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We reinterpret previous proposals to suggest that ...