Cognition and native-language grammar: The organizational role of adjective-noun word order in information representation (original) (raw)
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Prenominal adjective order and visual discrimination in children
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1974
Preschool and third-grade children heard prenominal adjective phrases describing an object. Each phrase contained an article, two adjectives and a head noun. The phrases were constructed with either normal or inverted adjective order. Either after a one second delay or immediately following phrase presentation, Subjects were shown pictures of two objects. One of the objects (target) depicted the object described in the noun phrase. The other object differed from the target along the dimensions of color, size, or both color and size. The Subject's task was to select the target object. It was predicted that adjective order would influence perceptual strategies used by the Subjects in the visual discrimination task. Analysis of response time scores showed that adjective order interacted with the relevant discriminative stimuli in the discrimination task. These results were interpreted as support for hypotheses that suggest that linguistic organization can constrain conceptual processing involving nonlinguistic information.
Languages, 2021
This study examines the effect of adjective type on distribution and interpretation of Spanish adjectives in native Polish classroom learners of Spanish. A native Spanish group (n = 16), an advanced Spanish learner group (n = 24), and an intermediate Spanish learner group (n = 25) completed one task examining knowledge of the syntactic distribution of intensional and classifying adjectives and two tasks examining interpretive knowledge of the syntax–semantic distribution of qualifying adjectives in Spanish. While native-like convergence largely obtained for the interpretive tasks, statistically significant differences obtained between native and learner groups on the syntactic task, perhaps a by-product of overgeneralization of the postnominal position resulting from explicit instruction. The main import of this study is that examination of an understudied and typologically–distinct language pairing allows for syntactic and syntax–semantic microvariations to inform the L2 learners’ ...
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Of the 24 possible orderings of the nominal modifiers Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective and the Noun, two specific patterns dominate the typology: Dem Num Adj N (as in English) and its mirror order N Adj Num Dem (as in Thai). This has been argued to follow from a universal underlying structure in which Adj forms a constituent with N first, Num scopes over that constituent, and finally Dem takes widest scope. We refer to noun phrase orders that follow this structure as scope-isomorphic. To test for general scope-isomorphic preferences in language users and assess a possible asymmetry between pre- and postnominal modifiers, we tested two linguistic populations with different NP orderings (English and Thai). Learners were exposed to a new language where modifiers were placed on the opposite side of the noun from their native language (i.e., English speakers learned that modifiers in the new language were postnominal and Thai speakers that they were prenominal). Crucially, though, learn...
Japanese EFL Learners' Implicit Knowledge of Prenominal Adjective Orders
2015
By the use of the priming paradigm, this study attempted to reveal whether or not highly proficient Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (Japanese EFL Learners) possess implicit knowledge of the constraints on prenominal adjective orders. Recent studies on real-time sentence processing and implicit grammatical knowledge in a second language (L2) have focused in depth on the real-time utilization of syntactic and morphosyntactic information of a target language. However, the counterpart of semantic constraints such as the order of prenominal adjectives (a nice small pen vs. a small nice pen) has remained quite obscure. In the present study, thirty-two participants (sixteen native speakers for the control group, the others for the experimental group) engaged in different sentence-level priming experiments with the following conditions: (a) the primes with the preferred prenominal adjective orders and the stimuli with the same pattern (P-P), (b) the preferred primes and t...
Old Grammars New (?) Scope: Adjective Placement in Native and Non-Native Spanish
Languages 2021, 6(1), 22., 2021
Prior studies have examined the association between modifying adjective placement and interpretation in second language (L2) Spanish. These studies show evidence of convergence with native speaker’s intuitions, which is interpreted as restructuring of the underlying grammar. Two issues deserve further study: (i) there are debates on the nature of native speaker’s interpretations; (ii) previous results could be explained by a combination of explicit instruction and access to the first language (L1). The present study re-examines native and non-native intuitions on the interpretation of variable order adjectives in pre-nominal and post-nominal positions, and extends the domain of inquiry by asking if L2 learners have intuitions about the order of two-adjective sequences, which appear in mirror image order in English and Spanish (faded blue pants vs. pantalones azules desteñidos). Two-adjective sequences are rare in the input, not typically taught explicitly, and have a different word order that cannot be [partially] derived from the L1 subgrammar. Two groups of non-native speakers (n = 50) and native speaker controls (n = 15) participated in the study. Participants completed a preference task, testing the interaction between word order and restrictive/non-restrictive interpretation, and an acceptability judgement task, testing ordering intuitions for two-adjective sequences. Results of the preference task show that the majority of speakers, both native and non-native, prefer variable adjectives in a post-nominal position independent of interpretation. Results of the acceptability judgement task indicate that both native and non-native speakers prefer mirror image order. We conclude that these results support underlying grammar reanalysis in L2 speakers and indicate that the semantic distribution of variable adjectives is not fully complementary; rather, the post-nominal position is unmarked, and generally preferred by both native and non-native speakers.
Although linguistic research has often focused on one domain (e.g., as influenced by generative prioritization of the Autonomy of Syntax), critical findings have been uncovered by exploring the interaction of multiple domains (e.g., the link between morphological status and lateralization of /r/; the syntactic-pragmatic interface's constraints on subject expression). The position of adjectives relative to the nouns they modify is a good test case in this discussion because multiple areas of the grammar are implicated, including syntax, phonology, and semantics. Moreover, research on this structure has yielded small cells, which prevented the use of statistical tests to convey the relative importance of multiple factors. Consequently, our study used a controlled, 24-item contextualized preference task to assess the roles of semantics (i.e., adjective class), phonology (i.e., noun-adjective syllable length differences), and lexical frequency on variable adjective ordering for 100 speakers of rioplatense Argentinean Spanish. Mixed-effects regression revealed that each factor was significant, with shorter, high-frequency, evaluative adjectives most favoring pre-position. Individual adjective analysis confirmed the greater effect of lexical frequency than semantic class, with additional corpora analyses further elucidating these trends. The study adds to the growing body of research on the role of factors across linguistic domains, while arguing for the importance of the relative frequency of adjective-noun collocations and complementing recent research on lexical effects.
Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020
Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come closest to the Noun, then Numerals, then Demonstratives (i.e., N-Adj-Num-Dem or some subset thereof). This order transparently reflects a constituent structure in which Adjectives combine with Nouns to the exclusion of Numerals and Demonstratives, and Numerals combine with Noun+Adjective units to the exclusion of Demonstratives. This structure has also been claimed to derive frequency asymmetries in complex noun phrase order across languages (e.g., Cinque 2005). However, we show that features of the methodology used in these experiments pot...
Comprehension of prenominal adjective orders
Memory & Cognition, 1974
In two experiments, phrases describing a referent object contained two prenominal adjectives in either normal or inverted order. The time to identify the position of the referent in a display was a function of both the adjective order and the nonreferent context. If the referent appeared with a nonreferent differing from it only in size or number. the normal order of adjectives facilitated responding. However, if the referent appeared with a nonreferent differing from it only in color, the inverted order of adjectives resulted in faster identification times. These results support a pragmatic communication rule that, when the more discriminating adjectives are ordered earlier in aseries. comprehension is facilitated.
Do learners' word order preferences reflect hierarchical language structure?
2019
Previous research has argued that learners infer word order patterns when learning a new language based on knowledge about underlying structure, rather than linear order (Culbertson & Adger, 2014). Specifically, learners prefer typologically common noun phrase word order patterns that transparently reflect how elements like nouns, adjectives, numerals, and demonstratives combine hierarchically. We test whether this result still holds after removing a potentially confounding strategy present in the original study design. We find that when learners are taught a naturalistic “foreign” language, a clear preference for noun phrase word order is replicated but for a subset of modifier types originally tested. Specifically, participants preferred noun phrases with the order N-Adj-Dem (as in “mug red this”) over the order N-Dem-Adj (as in “mug this red”). However, they showed no preference between orders N-AdjNum (as in “mugs red two”) and N-Num-Adj (as in “mugs two red”). We interpret this...