Charles Clifton
Biographic Data
| ID | 779915 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Clifton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Clifton |
| SIGNATURE | CLIFTON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5505-5330 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1924 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Interpreting Adjuncts: Processing English As- Clauses
Four experiments probed the interpretation of sentence-final as-clauses (e.g., Close the book as a librarian would/would do) ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a “propositional” interpretation. Experiment 1, an interpretation study, found a predominance of manner interpretations for sentences containing would and would do as the elliptical predicate inside the as-clause, biased by which form participants were initially exposed to. In E…
Tense and Discourse Structure: The Timeline Hypothesis
Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested coordinating (Narration) versus subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations in sentence-medial or sentence-…
Negative clauses imply affirmative topics and affirmative antecedents
Domain Restriction in Generic Statements
Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., everyone) and noun phrases (e.g., the girls). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces a topic situation, is the preferred context for interpreting the domain of subject noun phrases in the same sentence or a sub…
A Note on the Voice Mismatch Asymmetry in Ellipsis
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper
Context Effects in Discourse: The Question Under Discussion
Linguistic analyses of the Question Under Discussion (QUD) provide an interesting extension to Tony Sanford’s work on discourse coherence (e.g., Sanford & Emmott, 2012). The QUD approach claims that discourse is organized by a series of overt and covert questions and answers to, or comments on, them. In a coherent discourse, material that addresses the current QUD receives focus, and its processing is facilitated. After a brief review of the exis…
Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content
Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue’ (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypot…
Anticipating Negation: The Dos and Don'ts of Neg Raising
AbsractA sentence like (i) can often be used interchangeably with (ii). I don't think it's raining. I think it's not raining. With particular matrix predicates (e.g., think, seem, be probable) the negation from a complement clause may appear in the matrix clause, according to syntactic accounts, owing to a rule of Neg Raising, or according to semantic accounts, owing to a cancelable presupposition of the Excluded Middle (I believe p or I believe …
Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with: Object agreement in American English
We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with…
Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form
A dialog consisting of an utterance by one speaker and another speaker’s correction of its content seems intuitively to be made more acceptable when the new information is pitch accented or otherwise focused, and when the utterance and correction have the same syntactic form. Three acceptability judgment studies, one written and two auditory, investigated the interaction of focus (manipulated by sentence position and, in Experiments 2 and 3, pitc…
Sentence Comprehension, Psychology of
Relative clause attachment in German, English, Spanish and French: Effects of position and length
Partition If You Must: Evidence for a No Extra Times Principle
Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which subsets of the kids do different things, or it might involve quantifying over distinct scenarios, in which all of…
Language Comprehension and ProductionPreparation of this chapter was supported by NIH Grant HD051610 to R.T. and NIH Grant HD18708 to C.C. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and…
To produce and comprehend words and sentences, people use their knowledge of language structure; their knowledge of the situation they are in, including the previous discourse and the local situation; and their cognitive abilities, including memory, attention, and motor control. In this chapter, we explore how competent adult language users bring such knowledge and abilities to bear on the tasks of comprehending spoken and written language and pr…
Quantifiers Undone: Reversing Predictable Speech Errors in Comprehension
Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late . Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences…
Embedded implicatures observed: A comment on Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009)
Conventionalist theories of scalar implicature differ from other accounts in that they predict strengthening of embedded scalar terms. Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) argue that experimental support for this prediction is largely based on sentence comprehension tasks that inflate the frequency with which terms like some are strengthened. Using a picture verification task, they observed no strengthening of embedded scalars. We present data from a mu…
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
This guide accompanies the following article : Charles Clifton Jr and Adrian Staub, ‘Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution’, Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 234–250, doi: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2008.00055.x Introduction Two metaphors have dominated cognitive psychology throughout its history: ‘activation’ and ‘computation’. Activation (itself metaphorically based on neural firing rate) assumes that representations …
Processing syntax and morphology: A neurocognitive perspective
When are Downward-Entailing Contexts Identified? The Case of the Domain Widener Ever
October 01 2010 When are Downward-Entailing Contexts Identified? The Case of the Domain Widener Ever In Special Collection: CogNet Charles Clifton, Jr., Charles Clifton, Jr. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Lyn Frazier Lyn Frazier University of Massachusetts, Amherst Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Charles Clift…
Imperfect Ellipsis: Antecedents beyond Syntax
Ellipsis is subject to both syntactic and discourse conditions. Here we explore the discourse condition that favors antecedents that are part of the main assertion of an utterance. We argue that the main assertion tendency is best captured in the processor, not the grammar. Two experiments test verb-phrase ellipsis examples with antecedents in a conditional. One suggests that, because of the main assertion tendency, a reader considers full condit…
How prosody constrains comprehension: A limited effect of prosodic packaging
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
Eye movements in reading words and sentences
Focus, Accent, and Argument Structure: Effects on Language Comprehension
Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded question-answer pairs and asked list…
The syntax-discourse divide: Processing Ellipsis
VP-ellipsis and sluicing are forms of ellipsis that can cross a sentence boundary. We present a series of comprehension studies on these forms of ellipsis to elucidate their processing and the relation of syntactic and discourse processing. One set of studies examines the hypothesis that the representation of elided material is syntactically structured. We present evidence supporting the hypothesis and tentatively attribute the effects to sharing…
Informative Prosodic Boundaries
In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternative position suggested in Carlson, Clifton, and Frazi…
Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions
Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it.The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when).Further, in a small pilot study direct…
Parsing Coordinates and Ellipsis: Copy α
In this paper we argue that the human parsing mechanism has available two distinct methods of building syntactic structure. One mechanism, which has been studied extensively, involves building structure in response to the input in a step-by-step, inference-by-inference manner. Building more structure by this means involves more processing cost than building less structure. The second mechanism, proposed here, involves essentially cost-free copyin…
Relative Clause Interpretation Preferences in Spanish and English
Five experiments measured reading time for Spanish and English sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g., ... “the daughter of the colonel who had an accident”). As has been previously reported, Spanish sentences were read more rapidly when the content of the relative clause forced it to modify the first of the two NPs in the complex NP (“the daughter”) than when it modified the second NP (“the colonel”). Their English…
Construal: Overview, Motivation, and Some New Evidence
Relative clause attachment in German, English, Spanish and French: Effects of position and length
Processing Coordinate Structures
The use of syntactic information in filling gaps
Verb frame preferences: Descriptive norms
On Bound Variable Interpretations: The LF-Only Hypothesis
Don't break, or do
Quantifiers Undone: Reversing Predictable Speech Errors in Comprehension
Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late . Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences…
Processing "d-Linked" Phrases
Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions
It has been suggested that prosodic disambiguation of sentences is largely a matter of prosodic phrasing. Ambiguities can be resolved if a prosodic break aligns with a major syntactic boundary of one structure but not another. The placement of pitch accents is viewed as playing only a supporting role (cf. Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Huffnagel, & Fong, 1991). This view of prosodic disambiguation does not apply tho all structures of a language. We r…
How prosody constrains comprehension: A limited effect of prosodic packaging
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with: Object agreement in American English
We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with…
Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form
A dialog consisting of an utterance by one speaker and another speaker’s correction of its content seems intuitively to be made more acceptable when the new information is pitch accented or otherwise focused, and when the utterance and correction have the same syntactic form. Three acceptability judgment studies, one written and two auditory, investigated the interaction of focus (manipulated by sentence position and, in Experiments 2 and 3, pitc…
Imperfect Ellipsis: Antecedents beyond Syntax
Ellipsis is subject to both syntactic and discourse conditions. Here we explore the discourse condition that favors antecedents that are part of the main assertion of an utterance. We argue that the main assertion tendency is best captured in the processor, not the grammar. Two experiments test verb-phrase ellipsis examples with antecedents in a conditional. One suggests that, because of the main assertion tendency, a reader considers full condit…
Focus and VP Ellipsis
In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing its likelihood of contrasting with the subject of the elided clause. The results of Experiment 1 supp…
Negative clauses imply affirmative topics and affirmative antecedents
A Note on the Voice Mismatch Asymmetry in Ellipsis
The Economic Future of the Automobile Industry
Identification of Relevant Intra-Maze Cues in Latent Learning
A modification of Seward's (1949) procedure was used to demonstrate latent learning in a diamond maze, in which extra-maze cues are made irrelevant by having the positive and negative goal boxes adjacent. In a series of experiments, 55 of 60 rats made correct test trial choices. When the cues from visually distinctive areas halfway down the paths to the goal boxes were eliminated, only 15 of 30 Ss chose correctly. It was concluded that these visu…
Verb frame preferences: Descriptive norms
The independence of syntactic processing
The use of syntactic information in filling gaps
Successive cyclicity in the grammar and the parser
Four experiments studied the comprehension of sentences with relations between empty positions and phrases displaced from these positions (“gaps” and 'fillers). Evidence from self-paced reading and end-of-sentence acceptability judgement tasks confirms previous research indicating that the parser prefers to assign an identified filler as the argument of a verb immediately, rather than waiting to check the input for a lexical item of the expected …
Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 1
Relative Clause Interpretation Preferences in Spanish and English
Five experiments measured reading time for Spanish and English sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g., ... “the daughter of the colonel who had an accident”). As has been previously reported, Spanish sentences were read more rapidly when the content of the relative clause forced it to modify the first of the two NPs in the complex NP (“the daughter”) than when it modified the second NP (“the colonel”). Their English…
Focus, Accent, and Argument Structure: Effects on Language Comprehension
Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded question-answer pairs and asked list…
Construal: Overview, Motivation, and Some New Evidence
Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions
It has been suggested that prosodic disambiguation of sentences is largely a matter of prosodic phrasing. Ambiguities can be resolved if a prosodic break aligns with a major syntactic boundary of one structure but not another. The placement of pitch accents is viewed as playing only a supporting role (cf. Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Huffnagel, & Fong, 1991). This view of prosodic disambiguation does not apply tho all structures of a language. We r…
On Bound Variable Interpretations: The LF-Only Hypothesis
Processing Coordinate Structures
Parsing Coordinates and Ellipsis: Copy α
In this paper we argue that the human parsing mechanism has available two distinct methods of building syntactic structure. One mechanism, which has been studied extensively, involves building structure in response to the input in a step-by-step, inference-by-inference manner. Building more structure by this means involves more processing cost than building less structure. The second mechanism, proposed here, involves essentially cost-free copyin…
Informative Prosodic Boundaries
In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternative position suggested in Carlson, Clifton, and Frazi…
Processing "d-Linked" Phrases
Don't break, or do
Interface Problems: Structural Constraints on Interpretation
The syntax-discourse divide: Processing Ellipsis
VP-ellipsis and sluicing are forms of ellipsis that can cross a sentence boundary. We present a series of comprehension studies on these forms of ellipsis to elucidate their processing and the relation of syntactic and discourse processing. One set of studies examines the hypothesis that the representation of elided material is syntactically structured. We present evidence supporting the hypothesis and tentatively attribute the effects to sharing…
Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions
Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it.The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when).Further, in a small pilot study direct…
Eye movements in reading words and sentences
Processing Inferential Causal Statements: Theoretical Refinements and the Role of Verb Type
An evidential causal relation like, “Because most distinguished students got bad grades, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers,” is more difficult to process than a factual one like, “Because he got tired after a long semester, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers” (Noordman & de Blijzer, 2000 Noordman, L. and de Blijzer, F. 2000. “On the processing of causal relations”. In Cause, condition…
Focus and VP Ellipsis
In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing its likelihood of contrasting with the subject of the elided clause. The results of Experiment 1 supp…
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
How prosody constrains comprehension: A limited effect of prosodic packaging
Computer Science (39 works) · Linguistics (38 works) · Psychology (38 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (30 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (27 works) · Sentence (25 works) · Natural language processing (22 works) · Artificial Intelligence (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (15 works)