Nungon switch reference: Eyetracking during comprehension and production

Project description:
Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the “clause chain,” in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require “switch-reference” suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers’ gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language.

Dataset is available at osf. Identifier wp47e/.
To discuss the data, please contact Hannah Sarvasy ORCID 0000-0002-9551-480X.

项目说明：
全球范围内有数百种语言采用被称为“小句链（clause chain）”的句法结构，该类结构可将20个乃至更多小句堆叠组合为一个完整句子。巴布亚诸语言中的农贡语（Nungon）属于小句链语言的一个分支，其要求链式结构中非最终小句的动词必须带有“切换指称（switch-reference）”后缀。此类后缀用于标示后续小句的主语是否与前一小句的主语存在差异。

本研究聚焦心理语言学中的两大核心议题：语言理解过程中的预测性加工，以及语言产出过程中的前置规划。过往针对其他语言的相关研究已证实，句子规划可采用渐进式策略，但切换指称标记似乎会严格限制渐进式规划的实施——因为说话者需要先规划出下一个小句，才能完成当前小句的产出。这引出了一个耐人寻味的可能性：农贡语使用者的句子规划策略可能存在本质差异。

我们在巴布亚新几内亚的偏远村落中，借助移动眼动仪与太阳能笔记本电脑开展了两项实验（理解任务与产出任务），追踪农贡语使用者的眼动轨迹。有趣的是，理解任务的眼动数据并未发现切换指称标记被用于预测性加工的证据。但在产出任务中，我们发现了说话者会提前规划切换指称标记及其所关联主语的相关证据。

基于这一未被充分研究的语言中的新型词素类型的数据，我们提出：这种程度的前置句法规划，拓展了学界已知的句子规划边界。

本数据集可在osf获取，标识符为wp47e/。如需讨论该数据集，请联系Hannah Sarvasy，ORCID：0000-0002-9551-480X。