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Related Experiment Videos

Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions.

Charles Clifton1, Gisbert Fanselow, Lyn Frazier

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, cec@psych.umass.edu.

Linguistic Inquiry (Online)
|March 16, 2007
PubMed
Summary
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Syntactic theory does not require complex explanations for the "additional-wh" effect. Studies show no general effect, challenging previous assumptions about multiple questions in linguistics.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Syntax

Background:

  • The acceptability of sentences with multiple wh-phrases has been debated.
  • The
  • Superiority Condition
  • predicts that wh-phrases higher in syntactic structure are processed first.
  • The
  • additional-wh effect
  • refers to potential acceptability changes with more wh-phrases.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the acceptability of sentences with multiple wh-phrases.
  • To determine if adding a third wh-phrase affects the acceptability of Superiority violations.
  • To test whether the perceived acceptability of additional-wh sentences is a genuine effect or an artifact of comparison sentence quality.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted to assess sentence acceptability.
  • Participants judged sentences violating or obeying the Superiority Condition.
  • A pilot study compared sentences with adjacent final wh-phrases versus Superiority violation sentences without adjacent final wh-phrases.

Main Results:

  • Sentences violating the Superiority Condition were less acceptable than those obeying it.
  • Adding a third wh-phrase did not improve the acceptability of Superiority violations.
  • Adding a second question (e.g., "and when") did improve acceptability.
  • A pilot study suggested that perceived improvements in some additional-wh sentences might be due to the degraded quality of comparison sentences.

Conclusions:

  • There is no general
  • additional-wh effect
  • that requires complex syntactic explanations.
  • The perceived acceptability of multiple wh-questions may be influenced by factors other than syntactic structure, such as prosody and comparison sentence quality.