RUNNING HEAD: HEAVY-NP-SHIFT REFERENCE COMPREHENSION
Put in last position something previously unmentioned: word order effects on referential
expectancy and reference comprehension
Jennifer E. Arnold and Shin-Yi C. Lao
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Address all correspondence to:
Jennifer Arnold
UNC Chapel Hill
Dept. of Psychology
Davie Hall #337B
CB #3270
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270
jarnold@email.unc.edu
ABSTRACT
Research has shown that the comprehension of definite referring expressions (e.g., the triangle)
tends to be faster for given (previously mentioned) referents, compared to new referents. This
has been attributed to the presence of given information in the consciousness of discourse
participants, (e.g., Chafe, 1994) suggesting that given is always more accessible. We establish a
novel finding: a new bias occurs during the on-line comprehension of the direct object in heavyNP-shifted word orders, e.g. Put on the star the…. This order tends to be used for new direct
objects; canonical unshifted orders are more common with given direct objects. Thus, word order
provides probabilistic information about the givenness or newness of the direct object. Results
from eyetracking and gating experiments show that the traditional given bias only occurs with
unshifted orders; with heavy-NP-shifted orders comprehenders expect the object to be new, and
comprehension for new referents is facilitated.
Language comprehension requires the successful identification of the intended referent
for all referring expressions. But the linguistic content of such expressions is notoriously
underspecified. Listeners must figure out, for example, which paper the speaker means in I read
the paper, or which female is intended in I talked to her. It has been suggested that reference
comprehension can nevertheless succeed because listeners focus their attention on some entities
more than others; these focused entities are then privileged during reference interpretation (e.g.,
Garnham, 2001; Garrod & Sanford, 1994; Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993; MacDonald &
MacWhinney, 1990; McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995; Sanford & Garrod, 1981).
There is substantial evidence that reference comprehension is facilitated for referents that
are discourse-old or given (i.e., already mentioned in the discourse), compared with those that
are discourse-new, especially given referents occurring in prominent syntactic and thematic
positions (see, e.g., Almor, 2000; Arnold, 2001; Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, &
Trueswell, 2000; Chambers & Smyth, 1998; Clark & Sengul, 1979; Dahan et al., 2002; Foraker
& McElree, 2006; Gernsbacher et al., 1989; Järvikivi et al., 2004; Stevenson et al., 1993;
Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000). This research leads to the impression that the accessibility
of discourse entities occurs as a result of how recently or prominently they were mentioned.
Yet most research on reference comprehension has used stimuli with canonical word
orders (for exceptions see Kaiser & Trueswell, 2004; Staub, Clifton, & Frazier, 2006). Here we
provide the first evidence for reference comprehension biases during noncanonical heavy-NPshifted word orders (Kimball, 1973), e.g. Put on the table the large bag of cat food that I just
bought. Our results show that given and prominently mentioned information is not always
accessible, and new information can even be more accessible than given.
The possible accessibility of new information follows from the prediction that referent
accessibility is a function of how expected a referent is (Arnold, 1998, 2001; Arnold et al., in
press; Arnold & Tanenhaus, 2007). Variations in word order provide a promising test of this
prediction, because speakers tend to produce utterances with given information before new (e.g.,
Arnold, Wasow, Losongco & Ginstrom, 2000; Bock & Irwin, 1980; Haviland & Clark, 1974;
Gundel, 1988; Ward & Birner, 2001; Wasow, 2002). This means that by the end of an utterance,
listeners may expect reference to new information or something that was mentioned in a nonprominent syntactic position.
This prediction is particularly clear when listeners hear a low-frequency order like the
heavy-NP-shift. This order results when the direct object (e.g., the large bag of cat food that I
just bought) is not produced in its canonical position, but rather is produced after another postverbal constituent, on the table. This construction occurs very rarely (about 3% of the time with
the verb put, Wasow, 2002), and generally when the direct object is either relatively discoursenew or long, compared with the other constituents (Arnold et al., 2000; Hawkins, 1994;
Stallings, MacDonald, & O'Seaghdha, 1998; Wasow, 1997; Wasow, 2002). Therefore, once
listeners have heard enough of an utterance to recognize that it is heavy-NP-shifted, they may
expect the upcoming direct object to be new, facilitating reference to new entities.
By contrast, in canonical unshifted constructions, listeners tend to be biased towards
given and prominently positioned information. For example, most adults tend to perceive
Valentina as the pronoun referent in sentences like (1).
(1) Valentina greeted Francisca when she got home.
The accessibility of Valentina in this situation has been attributed to the prominence of
grammatical subject position, the prominence of first-mention position, and the structural
parallelism with the position of the pronoun (e.g., Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, &
Trueswell, 2000; Chambers & Smyth, 1998; Gernsbacher & Hargreaves, 1988; Stevenson et al.,
1993). Referent accessibility is also identified with focusing constructions like clefts and
acoustic prominence (Arnold, 1998; Almor, 2000; Foraker & McElree, 2006). Accessible
entities are particularly facilitated when the referring expression is extremely underspecified, for
example a pronoun (e.g., Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993). But even noun-phrase anaphors can
show a bias towards previously-mentioned entities. For example, Almor (1999) reported faster
reading times for noun-phrase anaphors with focused antecedents. During spoken language
comprehension, unaccented noun phrases are preferentially associated with the most highly
focused entity in the discourse (Arnold, 2007; Dahan et al., 2002), while accented noun phrases
are either biased towards previously-mentioned but unfocused entities (Dahan et al., 2001), or
equally biased towards focused and unfocused entities (Arnold, 2007). The picture that emerges
from this literature is that the listener's focus of attention is drawn towards things that have been
previously mentioned, especially those mentioned in a prominent position. One explanation is
that given information is accessible because it is in the listener's consciousness (Chafe, 1994),
suggesting that given information is always more accessible.
However, recent evidence demonstrates that previously unmentioned objects can become
accessible when reference to a new object is relatively expected. Arnold, Tananhaus, Altmann &
Fagnano (2004) examined the comprehension of disfluent speech (e.g., Now put thee uh…),
which occurs more frequently with references to new information than given. Thus, disfluency
provides information that the speaker is relatively likely to be referring to something new.
Arnold et al. monitored listeners eye movements during comprehension of references to given
and new information. With fluent instructions there were more looks to given objects that
matched the initial segment of the target noun, whereas disfluent instructions resulted in more
early looks to a new object. In a related finding, Arnold, Hudson-Kam & Tanenhaus (2007)
found that disfluency created a bias to interpret disfluent expressions as co-referential with novel
objects (the funny squiggly shape…), rather than familiar objects (the ice cream cone).
Does referential expectancy also vary as a function of word order? We tested this
question by examining listeners’ eye movements while they viewed displays like in Figure 1.
Listeners heard pairs of instructions, e.g., Put the red triangle with a squiggle on the heart. Now
put on the moon the red triangle with… The second instruction referred to something that was
either given (previously mentioned) or new (unmentioned), in an unshifted or heavy-NP-shifted
word order. All target objects (e.g., the red triangle with a squiggle) had a color-matched
competitor object (e.g., the red triangle with a tree). This created a temporary ambiguity at the
onset of the referring expression, where the input (the red triangle with) was consistent with both
a given and a new object. By looking at eye movements during this ambiguous region, we can
assess their biases towards given and new referents in different conditions (for similar
methodology see Allopenna et al., 1998; Arnold et al., 2004; Arnold et al., 2007; Dahan et al.,
2002).
All instructions used the verb put, which obligatorily takes a direct object NP. This means
that when comprehenders encountered the post-verbal prepositional phrase (e.g., Put on the
heart), they knew unambiguously that they were hearing the heavy-NP-shifted word order. By
contrast, the unshifted word order is so frequent that listeners were likely to initially assume this
order in the absence of evidence to the contrary (Staub et al., 2006).
[INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]
Because the heavy-NP-shifted word order is rare, we wanted participants to believe that
instructions had been produced naturally, which may be critical for making the inference that the
motivation for the shifted order was the newness of the direct object. We therefore followed the
technique developed by Arnold et al. (2004), telling participants that the instructions had been
recorded by naïve speakers giving instructions to live addressees. In actuality the instructions
were recorded by the first author.
The stimuli from the on-line experiment were first used in an off-line gating task to
establish that the expectancy of the direct object differed for shifted and unshifted word orders.
16 participants from UNC Chapel Hill heard digitally truncated versions of the instructions. The
first sentence was always heard in its entirety. In critical items the instruction was cut off before
the target NP was fully disambiguated (see Table 1). Participants identified what they thought
the speaker was about to say next, by circling a picture of the object on a piece of paper. Fillers
were truncated late enough to allow correct identification of the target (e.g., Now put on the sun
the grey triangle with a d-), to encourage participants to attend to the input. 24 experimental
items were combined with 36 fillers.
[INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
For both the short and long fragments, participants were more likely to choose the given
object in the unshifted than shifted condition (unshifted/short: 30%, shifted/short: 17%;
unshifted/long: 46%; shifted/long: 35%). That is, the given object was more expected in the
unshifted order. Analyses of variance revealed the crucial main effect of word order (F1 = 5.28,
p < .05, 2p = .26; F2 = 4.410, p < .047, 2p = .16), as well as main effect of fragment length (F1
= 14.392, p <.005; F2 = 14.571, p < .005). There were no interactions.
In sum, the heavy-NP-shifted word order decreases the expectancy of something given as
the referent of the direct object noun phrase, and increases the expectancy of something new. If
listeners can use this expectancy during on-line reference comprehension, their eye movements
should reveal a preference to look at the new referent during the ambiguous portion of the noun
phrase.
ON-LINE EXPERIMENT
Method
Participants. 48 students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill participated
in exchange for course credit. 4 were excluded from analysis: 1 for track loss, 1 because the
contingent analysis had too many missing cells, and 2 who reported attentional deficits on a
voluntary questionnaire. This left 44 participants in the analysis. All participants were native
speakers of English with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
Materials and Procedure. Participants viewed a display like Figure (1). Their eye
movements were monitored with an Eyelink II eyetracker, while they followed auditory
instructions to move one or more of the four objects in the middle of the screen. These four
objects were novel figures designed to have medium-length descriptive names, like The red
triangle with a squiggle. Each object was composed of a simple shape (triangle, circle, square,
cross, diamond, ring) and a superimposed modifier shape (e.g., squiggle, tree). The basic shape
was the same for all four objects in each display; two modifier shapes were crossed with two
colors to result in four different objects. There were four un-moveable destination objects in the
corners that were present on all trials (arrow, heart, sun, moon).
Each trial had two instructions (see Table 2). The first established one object as given.
The second, critical, instruction used either the heavy-NP-shifted or unshifted word order, and
asked the participant to move either the given object, or the new competitor (the other object
with the same color). The expression of interest was the direct-object noun phrase in the second
instruction.
One recording of the context instruction was used for the two given conditions, and one
was used for the two new conditions. The second instruction was cross-spliced so that both
unshifted conditions used the same frame Now put the {color} {object} with a…., on the
{location}, and both heavy-NP-shifted conditions used the same frame Now put on the
{location} the {color} {object} with a….. That is, the given and new instructions were identical
except for the modifier word. Furthermore, the exact same fragment for the target instruction was
used across all four conditions (e.g., the red triangle with a). The modifier word was
pronounced with an accent in the new condition, and without an accent in the given condition.
This preserved the natural correlation between givenness and accenting, which has been shown
to affect eye movements in this paradigm (see Arnold, 2007; Dahan et al., 2002). However, by
placing the emphasis on only the final modifier word (as is natural for complex noun phrases),
all four conditions had an identical ambiguous portion of the noun phrase.
There were 24 experimental items, rotated through the four conditions and assigned to 4
lists in a Latin square design. There were 36 fillers, which were like the experimental stimuli in
having two instructions, the second of which was heavy-NP-shifted in half the items. The 24
matched fillers pictured the same kinds of objects as the experimental stimuli, but the second
instruction always referred to one of the color-contrasting objects (half the time the one with the
same modifier, and half the time the one with a different modifier). This removed any
expectation that the second instruction would refer to one of the objects matching the color of the
object moved in the first instruction (as was always the case in the experimental items). There
were an additional 12 filler items that presented four different objects with different colors and
modifier types (e.g., green diamond with a bucket, purple square with a bucket, yellow diamond
with a bucket, yellow circle with a bunch of lines); on half of these the second instruction
referred to the given object from the first instruction, and on half it referred to a new, not-colormatched object. There were three practice items prior to the experiment (one heavy-NPshifted/new; one unshifted/new, and one unshifted/given).
Eye movements were monitored with an Eyelink II eyetracker. The visual and auditory
stimuli were presented on a PC computer running the ExBuilder software (Longhurst, 2006),
which randomized the order of presentation of trials. The location of display objects placed the
color-matched objects horizontal from each other, and the two objects with the same modifier
shape vertical from each other. The target occurred equally in all four positions on each list, and
at equal rates for each condition across all four positions across all lists. The first instruction
always moved an object to the adjacent destination, keeping the object in the same corner. The
second instruction moved either the same object or its color competitor to one of the locations on
the other half of the screen.
[INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
Results and Discussion
As predicted, the heavy-NP-shifted instructions led participants to look at the new colormatched object more often than the unshifted instructions did, starting at the onset of the critical
noun. Eye movements were analyzed in terms of looks to objects, which begin at the onset of a
saccade and continue until the next saccade. Looks were categorized in terms of each object on
the screen; i.e., a saccade to another part of the same object counted as part of the same look. All
reported statistical analyses consider eye movements occurring after the onset of the color word,
and prior to the mention of the modifier word (e.g., red triangle with a). This eliminates any
effects of the accenting on the modifier word, which is confounded with the given/new
manipulation. Since eye movements in response to linguistic input typically appear about 200300 msec after the onset of the critical word (e.g., Arnold et al., 2004; Dahan et al., 2002), the
region was defined as 300 msec after the color word onset until 300 msec after the modifier
onset.
Figure 2 reveals how participants directed their looks over time to display objects. These
graphs collapse across target referent (given vs. new), since we are primarily interested in
participants' biases during the initial, ambiguous portion of the referring expression, at which
point the target identity is unknown. Trials are only included if the participant was not already
looking at either of the color-matched objects at the onset of the critical region (t = color word +
300 msec; 66% of total).
In the unshifted condition, fixations to both given and new color-matched objects rose
initially, followed by a large advantage for the given object. By contrast, in the heavy-NP-shifted
condition there was a steady advantage for the new color-matched object throughout the
ambiguous region. Importantly, the contrast between word order conditions occurs within the
ambiguous region of the referring expression, demonstrating that listeners integrate word order
with givenness as they try to anticipate which red triangle is being referred to.
The effect of word order on preference for given or new referents is reflected in an
analysis of looks to the competitor object during the ambiguous region, which reveals more
given competitor looks in the unshifted condition, and more new competitor looks in the shifted
condition (Table 3). ANOVAs revealed the critical interaction between shifting and target
referent (F1(1,43) = 5.75, p < .05, 2p = .16; F2 (1,23) = 8.30, p < .01, , 2p = .44), as well as a
main effect of word order (F1(1,43 = 7.26, p < .05; F2(1,21) = 4.87, p <.05). Two items were
excluded from the items analysis because of missing cells. The same pattern obtained in an
analysis of the full dataset (including trials where the color-matched objects were fixated at
baseline (interaction: F1(1,43) = 5.54, p < .05, 2p = .11; F2 (1,23) = 8.21, p < .005, 2p = .26;
main effect of word order: (F1(1,43 = 19.66, p < .001; F2(1,23) = 24.82, p <.001). In all
analyses, trials with more than 33% trackloss during the critical region were excluded from
analysis (less than 3% of all trials).
Thus, looks to the given object dropped in the shifted condition, compared with the
unshifted condition. This parallels the findings from the gating task, which revealed that word
order influenced the expectancy of given and given objects.
[INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The results show that word order modulates the accessibility of given and new
information as listeners generate on-line hypotheses about what an expression refers to. This
constitutes the first demonstration that heavy-NP-shifting influences on-line reference
comprehension. Related evidence for how word order influences accessibility comes from
Finnish, in which the less frequent object-verb-subject word order led to the expectation that the
postverbal subject noun phrase would refer to something not previously mentioned (Kaiser &
Trueswell, 2004).
The effect of heavy-NP-shifting on accessibility supports the proposal that listeners
interpret referential expressions in real time by preferentially considering referents that are
relatively expected in the current context (e.g., Arnold & Tanenhaus, 2007). These findings join
other evidence for the facilitation of expected referents, for example through disfluency (Arnold
et al., 2004), the affordances of available objects for particular actions (Chambers et al., 2002),
or the semantic constraints of verbs on possible direct objects (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;
Kamide et al., 2003).
Our findings specifically support the prediction that reference comprehension can be
facilitated for both given and new information. The bias toward new information with the heavyNP-shifted word order falls in contrast with the wealth of existing studies showing that given and
prominently mentioned information is more accessible than new. This shows that
comprehenders are sensitive to fine-grained contingencies about likely patterns of reference:
given is more likely early in an utterance, but new is more likely late in an utterance, especially
with the specialized shifted construction. Thus, referential accessibility is not just the result of
how recently or how prominently an entity has been mentioned, but instead is modulated by its
likelihood of mention in a particular position.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Jordan Todd and Glenn Kern for their help with stimulus preparation, and to Bob
McMurray for the use of his data analysis program. This research was funded by NIH grant HD41522 to J. Arnold.
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TABLES
Table 1.
Sample auditory instructions for the gating task.
Condition
Unshifted
S1: Context
Put the red triangle with a squiggle on the heart.
S2: Short fragment
Now put …
S2: Long fragment
Now put the red triangle with….
Heavy-NP-shifted
S1: Context
Put the red triangle with a squiggle on the heart.
S2: Short fragment
Now put on the moon…
S2: Long fragment
Now put on the moon the red triangle with….
Table 2.
Sample auditory instructions for the on-line experiment.
Condition
Unshifted/given
Put the red triangle with a squiggle on the heart.
Now put the red triangle with a squiggle on the sun.
Unshifted/new
Put the red triangle with a tree on the heart.
Now put the red triangle with a squiggle on the sun.
Heavy-NP-shifted/given
Put the red triangle with a squiggle on the heart.
Now put on the sun the red triangle with a squiggle.
Heavy-NP-shifted/new
Put the red triangle with a tree on the heart.
Now put on the sun the red triangle with a squiggle.
Table 3.
Percentage of time spent looking at the competitor (color-matched object), starting 300 msec
after the onset of the color word until 300 msec after the onset of the modifier. Data include only
trials with no baseline looks to given or new critical objects.
Condition
%
SE
Unshifted/given competitor
28.8
3.1
Unshifted/new competitor
22.7
2.4
Heavy-NP-shifted/given competitor
16.6
2.1
Heavy-NP-shifted/new competitor
22.7
2.4
FIGURES
FIGURE CAPTIONS
Figure 1. Sample visual display for on-line and gating experiments. The top two triangles in this
example are red; the bottom two are blue. All corner shapes are yellow.
Figure 2a (Unshifted condition) and Figure 2b (Heavy-NP-shifted condition). Starting 300 msec
after the onset of the color word, proportion looks over time to the given and new critical objects
(i.e., those that match the color of the auditory referring expression), and to unrelated (non-colormatched) objects. Data include only trials with no baseline looks to given or new critical
objects.
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G r aphics decom pr essor
ar e needed t o see t his pict ur e.
Q uickTim e™ and a
G r aphics decom pr essor
ar e needed t o see t his pict ur e.
Q uickTim e™ and a
G r aphics decom pr essor
ar e needed t o see t his pict ur e.
Figure 1. Sample visual display for Experiments 1 and 2. The top two triangles in this example
are red; the bottom two are blue. All corner shapes are yellow.
given
given
Heavy-NP-Shifted
new
new
unrelated
50%
40%
40%
30%
30%
time from onset color word
1164
972
876
780
684
588
1164
1068
972
876
780
684
0%
588
0%
492
10%
396
10%
492
20%
396
20%
300
% looks
50%
300
% looks
unrelated
1068
Unshifted
time from onset color word
Figure 2a (Unshifted condition) and Figure 2b (Heavy-NP-shifted condition). Starting 300 msec
after the onset of the color word, proportion looks over time to the given and new critical objects
(i.e., those that match the color of the auditory referring expression), and to unrelated (non-colormatched) objects. Data include only trials with no baseline looks to given or new critical
objects.