Sandra Villata | Università di Enna Unikore (original) (raw)

Papers by Sandra Villata

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 9, 2021

One of the defining characteristics of human languages is the existence of long-distance dependen... more One of the defining characteristics of human languages is the existence of long-distance dependencies: dependencies that can exist between two elements with no apparent bound on the linear distance (as measured in words) or hierarchical distance (as measured in clauses) between them. The unboundedness of long-distance dependencies is illustrated in (1) using whdependencies in English. The head of the dependency is the wh-word what; the tail of the dependency is indicated with an underscore.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2020

Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the prese... more Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the presence of an attractor mismatching the agreement feature of the target. In contrast, results from comprehension studies are mixed, ranging from lack of effect to facilitation. We report 2 forced-choice experiments and 2 self-paced reading experiments on number and gender object-verb agreement in French to systematically explore the effect of a mismatching subject in the production and comprehension of object relatives. Results show that the presence of a mismatching subject penalizes sentence production, in line with reports of attraction, but consistently improves sentence comprehension in off-line comprehension measures, in line with similarity-based interference effects. We discuss the limits of classical models of sentence production and comprehension (Marking and Morphing and ACT-R), and favor a self-organizing sentence processing approach (SOSP), which accounts for both production and comprehension results through a single similarity-based mechanism of structure building. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognition, May 1, 2022

Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categoric... more Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient effects (sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model. SOSP generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values by assuming a flexible structure-formation system in which the parses are formed even under sub-optimal circumstances by coercing elements to play roles that do not optimally suit them. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although many linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We describe the conceptual framework of SOSP, showing that it largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that block dependencies into elements that allow them.

Syntax, Jan 20, 2020

Results from a new grammaticality-judgment experiment in French confirm the published finding in ... more Results from a new grammaticality-judgment experiment in French confirm the published finding in English that sentences containing a Superiority violation involving a bare extracted element and a lexically restricted intervener (e.g., 'What did which student buy?'), a configuration termed inverse inclusion, are more acceptable than those involving a lexically restricted extracted element and a bare intervener (e.g., 'Which book did who buy'), a configuration termed inclusion. To account for this pattern, we adopt an explicit implementation of covert movement and propose some modifications in the characterization of the class of interveners. Interestingly, experimental findings on extraction from wh islands attest the opposite pattern: there, inclusion is more acceptable than inverse inclusion. We argue that whereas (overt) extraction from wh islands is sensitive to the feature content of the extractee and the intervener (i.e., whether or not they are lexically restricted), the degree of (un) acceptability of Superiority violations hinges on the different landing-site options that the features of the extractee and the intervener permit.

The extraction of a wh-element (extractee) across another wh-element (intervener) lowers acceptab... more The extraction of a wh-element (extractee) across another wh-element (intervener) lowers acceptability: (1) *What i do you wonder who built __ i ? +Q +Q However, acceptability is reported to improve whenever the extractee is lexically restricted [1]: (2) ?Which building i do you wonder who built __ i ? +Q, +N +Q Featural Relativized Minimality (henceforth, fRM [2,3]) accounts for this improvement by stating that the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted by an intervening element as a function of the feature's overlap between the intervener and the extractee. Only morphosyntactic features triggering movement (e.g., +Q) enter in the calculation of the feature's overlap.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019

The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax

Cognition, 2022

Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 2020

Two key processes in sentence processing are syntactic movement and the computation of agreement.... more Two key processes in sentence processing are syntactic movement and the computation of agreement. We report two studies exploring the consequences of gender mismatch in the comprehension and production of French object relatives, requiring both the computation of movement and agreement. We show that gender mismatch enhances comprehension while penalizing production. We argue that comprehension and production are sensitive to different kinds of intervention: while comprehension is sensitive to similarity-based interferences, which are reduced by feature mismatch, production is sensitive to attraction effects, which arise in configurations of feature mismatch.

My dissertation investigates interference effects in the comprehension and production of long-dis... more My dissertation investigates interference effects in the comprehension and production of long-distant dependencies in adults, integrating insights from theories on formal syntax and cognitive psychology granting a key role to similarity-based interference effects as a source of processing difficulty and/or ungrammaticality. My research mainly focuses on wh-islands' acceptability and attraction effects in agreement, which can both be taken as windows on interference effects in sentence processing. My research suggests that: (i) only similarity on a narrow class of syntactic features has the potential to generate ungrammaticality, while similarity in terms of other features increases processing difficulty without changing the grammatical status of the sentence; (ii) attraction effects can be conceived as the result of similarity-based interference; (iii) encoding interference plays a key role in generating processing difficulties; (iv) self-organised sentence processing models off...