A Self-Paced Reading study on Processing Constructions with different degrees of Compositionality

Introduction. Our research aims at challenging the classical principle of compositionality in sentence processing. While the principle of compositionality is traditionally considered as the primary mean of explaining linguistic productivity, we argue it is just a default option within a more complex scenario, where a series of noncompositional mechanisms (analogy with stored exemplars, shallow processing, activation of a network of mutual expectations, etc.) can be used in processing not only formulaic language expressions but a larger set of expressions with a completely transparent meaning. Psycholinguistic literature has studied two noncompositional cases: idiomatic processing, associated with faster reading time [1] and a more positive electric signal in brain activity [2] to transparent phrases, and frequency effects, i.e., multiword sequences are usually read faster than comparable sequences of lesser frequency [3,4]. We assume that facilitation effects are not limited to formulaic expressions but also occur when processing highly prototypical and yet compositional phrases. To test this hypothesis, we implemented a Self-Paced Reading experiment to compare the Reading Times (RTs) of argument constructions with a different degree in compositionality: idiomatic expressions (ID), compositional highly frequent expressions (HF), and compositional low- frequent expressions (LF). To the best of our knowledge, no previous work had compared both idioms and frequent constructions, except for [5]. Given the previous literature, we hypothesized that RTs are longer for compositional sentences than for idiomatic sentences, and RTs are longer for infrequent phrases than for frequent ones. Design. We selected 48 idiomatic VERB+determinant+NOUN phrases and corresponding high-frequency and low-frequency bigrams with the same verb. Each stimulus consisted of a context sentence presented for the participant to read in one instance and a sentence with the target phrase embedded (Table1), displayed word-by-word using the moving-window SPR paradigm [6]. The stimuli were split into three counterbalanced lists randomly initialized at each time. The experiment was delivered remotely, and participants were recruited using Prolific. We collected responses for 90 subjects from the United States and Canada, all self - reported L1 speakers of English aged between 18 and 50. Data Analysis. We removed the outliers and examined the RTs of the last word of phrases using linear mixed models. Condition, Age, WordLength, VerbFrequency, and PositionInList were entered in the models as fixed effects; Subject and Item were treated as random effects with a by-subject random slope for BigramFrequency. RTs' difference between ID and HF turned out to be not statistically significant (Table2), while it was statistically different between ID and LF. Changing the reference level with HF condition, there is still a smaller statistical difference between HF and LF. Moreover, we observed that 1) older adults are slower than younger speakers, and 2) RTs at the end of the experiment are faster than at the beginning. Discussion. Analysis reveals no difference between processing the figurative meaning of idioms and the compositional one of HF; there are facilitation effects in comprehension of both expressions. Even if this observed measure cannot say what is happening at the brain level, it opens to a broad discussion about underlying mechanisms in language processing. It may support the hypothesis that HF expressions are stored as unanalyzed wholes and directly retrieved once recognized as idioms, following usage-based models [7,8]. An alternative explanation is the existence of a co-activated network of representations operating together with analogy-based mechanisms leading to sentence meaning construction and working side by side with classical compositional ones. RTs for infrequent phrases were significantly slower, even if the advantage was relatively small. We presume that information introduced in context sentences reduces the effort to interpret unpredictable expressions. [1] Conklin, K., & Schmitt, N. (2008). Formulaic sequences: Are they processed more quickly than nonf ormulaic language by native and nonnative speakers?. Applied linguistics, 29(1), 72-89. [2] Vespignani, F., Canal, P., Molinaro, N., Fonda, S., & Cacciari, C. (2010). Predictive mechanisms in idiom comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1682-1700. [3] Arnon, I., & Snider, N. (2010). More than words: Frequency ef f ects f or multi -word phrases. Journal of memory and language, 62(1), 67-82. [4] Tremblay, A., Derwing, B., Libben, G., & Westbury, C. (2011). Processing advantages of lexical bundles: Evidence f rom self ‐paced reading and sentence recall tasks. Language learning, 61(2), 569- 613. [5] Jolsvai, H., McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2020). Meaningf ulness beats f requency in multiword chunk processing. Cognitive Science, 44(10). [6] Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 111(2), 228–238. [7] Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxf ord University Press on Demand. [8] Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge University Press. [9] Bannard, C. and D. Matthews (2008). Stored word sequences in language learning: The ef f ect of f amiliarity on children’s repetition of f our-word combinations. Psychological science 19.3, 241–248