The relative accessibility of semantic and deep-structure syntactic concepts

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Theories of linguistic behavior propose different levels of representation, including semantic and syntactic structures.
• The relative accessibility of these structures is crucial for understanding language processing.
• Distinguishing between semantically based theories (e.g., Case Grammar) and syntactically based theories (e.g., Standard Theory) is key.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relative accessibility of semantic versus deep-structure syntactic concepts.
• To compare the psychological reality of semantically driven linguistic representations against syntactically driven ones.
• To provide empirical evidence to support or refute competing linguistic theories.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Concept-formation task to assess learning speed of "deep-structure subject" vs. "experiencer" (semantic case).
• Experiments 2 & 3: Recognition memory procedure to evaluate recall based on semantic vs. deep-structure syntactic differences.
• Utilized controlled experimental designs to isolate variables related to semantic and syntactic processing.

Main Results:

• Subjects learned the semantic concept "experiencer" faster than the syntactic concept "deep-structure subject" in Experiment 1.
• Recognition memory performance was significantly poorer when sentences differed by deep-structure syntax compared to semantic relations in Experiments 2 and 3.
• These findings indicate a hierarchy of accessibility favoring semantic representations.

Conclusions:

• The empirical evidence supports semantically based linguistic theories, such as Fillmore's Case Grammar.
• Deep-structure syntactic relations appear less accessible in cognitive processing than semantic relations.
• The study challenges aspects of Chomsky's "standard theory" by highlighting the primacy of semantic factors in language comprehension and learning.