In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. To facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using ERPs. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

In many languages, finite-clause-embedding verbs vary in whether they allow wh-dependencies to cross from the embedded to the matrix clause—a phenomenon we call 'bridge effects'. Why bridge effects exist has been the subject of much debate; we argue that contributing to the lack of consensus are the relatively small samples of verbs (from twelve to seventy-five for English) previously tested in the literature. To resolve this issue, we report two new data sets of bridge effects covering a nearly exhaustive sample of 640 English verbs. We use these data sets to address three research questions: Are there bridge effects at all? How well do leading theories of bridge effects explain observed variation across the full range of verbs? And are there new patterns emerging from our data that could lead to a better theory? We ultimately argue in favor of a multivariate approach, drawing upon existing ideas while including a novel morphosyntactic licensing component identified from our data. We also discuss implications for theories of locality and explore how context might affect the acceptability of wh-dependencies.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using event-related potentials. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

According to the historical empirical consensus in the field, wh-argument extraction from embedded wh-questions gives rise to island effects in English, but not in Spanish. This observation – which was important for the development of a parameters-based theory of cross-linguistic variation in islands – has recently been challenged by experimental studies showing wh-island effects in both languages. However, these studies typically employ different materials and experimental conditions between languages, limiting direct comparison. Our study addresses this limitation by testing wh-islands in both English and Spanish with translation-matched materials. We present twelve acceptability judgment experiments with approximately 100 participants per experiment. In each language, we examine wh-argument extraction from three wh-clause types (introduced by whether, why and when) under two matrix verb types (know and ask), amounting to six wh-islands that are relevant to assess the reported contrasts. We test (i) for the presence or absence of wh-island effects in the two languages, (ii) for a gradient contrast in effect size, and (iii) for evidence of increased individual variation in Spanish as compared to English. We find (i) that wh-island effects are present in both English and Spanish, (ii) that they are rather large in both languages and larger in Spanish for most wh-island types, and (iii) that Spanish does not show more individual variation in wh-island effects than English. Our results speak against the cross-linguistic contrast as originally proposed, suggesting that its use as evidence for theories that encode cross-linguistic variation in wh-island effects might need to be reconsidered.

Abstract This chapter explores the potential value of electrophysiological measures like electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) for experimental syntax. Our view is that applying M/EEG research in syntax is high-risk/high-reward: if one believes that cognition is mediated by electrical activity in the cortex, and if one believes that syntactic theories are ultimately theories of cognition, then M/EEG is a potential source of information about syntax. Our goal in this chapter is to introduce syntacticians to the fundamentals of M/EEG so that they can decide if the risk/reward ratio is worth it in their own research. We begin by introducing the three content areas necessary to understand M/EEG methods: the basics of electricity, the neurobiology underlying scalp potentials, and the math necessary to extract useful information from the signal. We briefly review some of the ERP and time-frequency results in the sentence processing literature, in order to provide a foundation for thinking about ways to leverage M/EEG results in service of syntax. And we discuss several recent studies that have attempted to directly link syntactic theories with sentence processing and M/EEG measures.

AbstractIn this concluding chapter of the handbook, each contributor has written a 500 word mini-essay presenting their view of the future of experimental syntax, from the important theoretical questions on the horizon, to the methodological challenges that experimental syntacticians need to solve to answer those questions. The hope is that this final chapter will serve both as concrete inspiration for future studies in experimental syntax and as a benchmark for measuring the success of the field in the years to come.

Models of visual word processing incorporate morphological decomposition as a step in the recognition process, but they vary as to when this step happens, and what kind of information is used in it. In particular, the affix stripping model proposes that words are accessed through their stems, after affixes are automatically stripped off. This dichotomy between stems and affixes seems to be mirrored in masked priming. Masked stem priming is quite robust and comparable to masked repetition priming, whereas masked affix priming is often null, or very small. However, the literature on masked affix priming is much smaller than the one on masked stem priming. This study investigates the stem vs suffix asymmetry in masked priming by running an online experiment with a large sample size (N=161) to ensure higher statistical power. For comparison and validation, the same experiment was also conducted in a standard lab setting. In addition, we ran a follow-up experiment with two additional suffix priming conditions with an even larger sample size (N=400) to assess the influence of orthographic and strategic confounds. The three experiments show significant stem priming, but null or very small suffix priming, thus supporting the asymmetry between stem activation and affix stripping.

This study brings evidence from Jordanian Arabic, a primarily spoken grammatical-resumption language, into the (formal-experimental) empirical base of both theories of island effects and theories of island amelioration by resumption. We report four auditory judgment studies exploring two dependency types and four island types with a gap or resumption in the tail of the dependency, yielding 16 distinct quantified effects. Our experiments identified two notable sources of variation: variation across dependency types in the sets of island effects that occur with gaps and variation across island types in amelioration by resumption. We discuss the challenges these results raise for four major classes of theories of island effects, and we point to paths forward for each. We also discuss the consequences of the variation in amelioration for theories of the source of resumption, concluding that both base generation and movement must be available options to learners of Jordanian Arabic. We also observe some evidence of individual variation in the availability of resumption across dependency types that could be explored in future studies.

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a noun complement headed by toyuu ‘that.say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are also complex NPs, and uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands (as expected), and strong evidence that noun complements are not. Our second experiment also found strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, but yielded a small, non-significant, trend toward an effect with noun complements. Based on the sizes of our samples (89 and 90 participants, respectively), the sizes of the effects, and the details of the acceptability patterns, we conclude that noun complements in Japanese are not islands with respect to NP-scrambling. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to scrambling out of (non-island) declarative CPs. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor/actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince/princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Island effects are one of the most studied phenomena in experimental syntax. There are at least two reasons for this. First, they are a terrific case study for a number of foundational questions in linguistics, covering topics such as the complexity of the grammar, the variation of languages, the dynamics of sentences processing, and the acquisition of abstract constraints. Second, they are a valuable case study for illustrating the benefits of formal experiments, such as defining an effect, isolating the source of an effect, and increasing the precision of the empirical bases of linguistic theories. In this chapter, we illustrate these benefits of formal experiments for island effects by reviewing the major empirical contributions that formal experiments have made to theories of island effects over the past two decades. Along the way, we also provide a relatively comprehensive list of articles that have used formal experiments to explore island effects.

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature-UTAH and rUTAH-can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of the child's acquisition task, including realistic child-directed input and a cognitively motivated mechanism for inference (the sufficiency threshold, derived from the Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles). We find that rUTAH can be derived but UTAH can't, if children derive their linking theories from their input as specified here. We discuss the implications of these results for both syntactic theory and acquisition theory.

The primary goal of this chapter is to discuss the validity of acceptability judgments as a data type. The author’s view is that acceptability judgments have most, if not all, of the hallmarks of a valid data type: syntacticians have a plausible theory of the source of acceptability judgments, a theory of how to leverage judgments for the construction of syntactic theories using experimental logic, and a set of evaluation criteria that are similar to those used for other data types in the broader field of psychology. At an empirical level, acceptability judgments have been shown to be relatively reliable across tasks and participants, to be relatively sensitive, and to be relatively free of theoretical bias. Therefore the author’s view is that acceptability judgments are at least as valid as other data types that are used in the broader field of language science.

One central claim in the literature on resumptive pronouns is that resumptive pronouns ameliorate island effects. For languages that do not allow resumption as a grammatical option (intrusive resumption), a number of recent acceptability judgment studies have cast doubt on this claim by showing small or no amelioration effects. For languages that do allow resumption as a grammatical option (grammaticalized resumption), there have been relatively few judgment studies; but the few that exist have also shown small or no amelioration effects. In this article, we further investigate this issue for spoken Jordanian Arabic, a relatively understudied grammaticalized resumption language. We test four island types (adjunct, complex NP, wh, and whether) and two dependency types (bare wh-words and relative clauses) in an auditory judgment study. Our results revealed seven island effects with gaps. With resumption, one shows clear amelioration; one shows a novel form of amelioration involving a subliminal island effect; and five show no amelioration. This pattern of results raises the possibility that the claim that grammaticalized resumption ameliorates island effects is less universal, and therefore more complex, than previously thought. Though not the focus of our study, our results also suggest a number of new avenues of research on topics related to resumption and movement, such as the uniformity of Aʹ-dependencies with respect to island effects, the role of movement in resumption, the cross-linguistic variation in island effects, and the existence of subliminal island effects.

Sprouse and Almeida (2017) provide a first systematic investigation of the sensitivity of four acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we build on these results by decomposing those tasks into three constituent task features (single versus joint presentation, number of response options, and use of response labels), and explore the consequences of those task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments. We present 6 additional experiments (for a total of 10) designed to probe the effect of those task features on sensitivity, both independently and in combination. Our results suggest three notable conclusions: (i) there is a clear advantage to joint presentation of theoretically-related sentence types, regardless of the type of response scale used in the experiment; (ii) tasks involving a continuous slider (which have an infinite number of response options, and few labels) offer good sensitivity, while relying solely on spatial reasoning rather than numeric reasoning; and (iii) there are a number of subtle interactions among the three task features that may warrant further investigation. We discuss the potential benefits and concerns of each of these features in detail, along with the relevance of these findings for deciding how to investigate both simple and higher-order acceptability contrasts.

This paper presents an experimental study to examine whether scrambling out of an island is (im-)possible in Korean. It is shown that scrambling out of an island may trigger occasional additive degradation in acceptability, but no super-additive degradation is obtained in leftward or rightward scrambling (or right-dislocation), contrary to wh-movement in English. Our results also show that strong islands may cause additive degradation whereas weak islands do not. The current study poses a new challenge to a processing approach to islands which solely relies on linear dependencies, and demonstrates that the role and type of island structures must be considered. Our research also suggests that a factorial-design experiment needs to be employed to examine potential interactions among scrambling, the direction of movement, and island effects in language.

This chapter is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for thinking about the use of data in grammatical theories, for both linguists and non-linguists. Five types of linguistic data are discussed—corpus data, acceptability judgements, reading time measures (eye-tracking and self-paced reading), electrophysiological data (EEG and MEG), and haemodynamic data (specifically, fMRI)—with a particular focus on the logic necessary to link each data type to predictions made by grammatical theories (linking hypotheses). The chapter also covers the empirical and logical challenges facing each data type, in an attempt to encourage closer ties among researchers using each of the data types.

To successfully learn language-and more specifically how to use verbs correctly-children must solve the linking problem: they must learn the mapping between the thematic roles specified by a verb's lexical semantics and the syntactic argument positions specified by a verb's syntactic frame. We use an empirically grounded and integrated quantitative framework involving corpus analysis, experimental meta-analysis, and computational modeling to implement minimally distinct versions of mapping approaches that (i) either are specified a priori or develop during language acquisition, and (ii) rely on either an absolute or a relative thematic role system. Using successful verb class learning as an evaluation metric, we embed each approach within a concrete model of the acquisition process and see which learning assumptions are able to match children's verb-learning behavior at three, four, and five years old. Our current results support a trajectory where children (i) may not have prior expectations about linking patterns between ages three and five, and (ii) begin with a relative thematic system, progressing toward optionality between a relative and an absolute system. We discuss implications of our results for both theories of syntactic representation and theories of how those representations are acquired. We also discuss the broader contribution of this study as a concrete modeling framework that can be updated with new linking theories, corpora, and experimental results.

Two acceptability experiments are presented which assess whether resumptive pronouns freely alternate with gaps and/or ameliorate island violation effects in wh-questions in Modern Standard Arabic. Both experiments test Complex Noun Phrase Constraint violations, adjunct island violations, and whether island violations. The results indicate that resumption is largely only acceptable with structurally complex DP fillers (which-NP) and is generally preferred to gapped structures in long-distance dependencies. Resumption is also shown to ameliorate the grammatical component of some island violations (adjunct and whether islands), but in different quantitative amounts across different islands. The overall picture which emerges is one in which resumption is quantitatively, but perhaps not qualitatively, helpful in repairing grammatical constraint violations in Modern Standard Arabic. 0Thanks to Souad Al Helou for assistance with stimuli creation and experimental procedure. Thanks to Salam Khalifa and Anas Shahrour for help with stimuli preparation. Thanks to the members of the United Arab Emirates University, Tommi Leung, and arabic-L email list for assistance with participant recruitment. Thanks to Jim McCloskey, Dustin Alfonso Chacón, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the 30th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics and University of Minnesota for comments on previous versions of this work. All remaining faults are ours alone.