Anastasia Philipps

• Philipps, Anastasia; Arehalli, Suhas; Linzen, Tal & Kush, Dave Whitney (2025). Learning filler-gap dependencies with neural language models: Testing island sensitivity in Norwegian and English. Journal of Memory and Language. ISSN 0749-596X. 144. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104663. Full text in Research Archive
• Kobzeva, Anastasia & Kush, Dave Whitney (2025). Acquiring constraints on filler-gap dependencies from structural collocations: Assessing a computational learning model of island-insensitivity in Norwegian. Language Acquisition. ISSN 1048-9223. 33(1), p. 39–82. doi: 10.1080/10489223.2024.2440340. Full text in Research Archive
• Kobzeva, Anastasia & Kush, Dave Whitney (2024). Grammar and Expectation in Active Dependency Resolution: Experimental and Modeling Evidence From Norwegian. Cognitive Science. ISSN 0364-0213. 48(10), p. e13501–e13501. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13501. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Filler-gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler-gap dependency resolution is suspended inside island domains like embedded questions in some languages. Processing-based accounts hold that resource limitations prevent gap-filling in embedded questions across languages, while grammar-based accounts predict that active gap-filling is only blocked in languages where embedded questions are grammatical islands. In a self-paced reading study, we find that Norwegian participants exhibit filled-gap effects inside embedded questions, which are not islands in the language. The findings are consistent with grammar-based, but not processing, accounts. Second, we asked if active filler-gap processing can be understood as a special case of probabilistic ambiguity resolution within an expectation-based framework. To do so, we tested whether word-by-word surprisal values from a neural language model could predict the location and magnitude of filled-gap effects in our behavioral data. We find that surprisal accurately tracks the location of filled-gap effects but severely underestimates their magnitude. This suggests either that mechanisms above and beyond probabilistic ambiguity resolution are required to fully explain active gap-filling behavior or that surprisal values derived from long-short term memory are not good proxies for humans' incremental expectations during filler-gap resolution.

• Kobzeva, Anastasia; Sant, Charlotte; Robbins, Parker T.; Vos, Myrte Titia; Lohndal, Terje & Kush, Dave Whitney (2022). Comparing Island Effects for Different Dependency Types in Norwegian. Languages. 7(3), p. 1–25. doi: 10.3390/languages7030197. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Recent research suggests that island effects may vary as a function of dependency type, potentially challenging accounts that treat island effects as reflecting uniform constraints on all filler-gap dependency formation. Some authors argue that cross-dependency variation is more readily accounted for by discourse-functional constraints that take into account the discourse status of both the filler and the constituent containing the gap. We ran a judgment study that tested the acceptability of wh-extraction and relativization from nominal subjects, embedded questions (EQs), conditional adjuncts, and existential relative clauses (RCs) in Norwegian. The study had two goals: (i) to systematically investigate cross-dependency variation from various constituent types and (ii) to evaluate the results against the predictions of the Focus Background Conflict constraint (FBCC). Overall we find some evidence for cross-dependency differences across extraction environments. Most notably wh-extraction from EQs and conditional adjuncts yields small but statistically significant island effects, but relativization does not. The differential island effects are potentially consistent with the predictions of the FBCC, but we discuss challenges the FBCC faces in explaining finer-grained judgment patterns.

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• Kobzeva, Anastasia; Arehalli, Suhas; Linzen, Tal & Kush, Dave Whitney (2022). LSTMs Can Learn Basic Wh- and Relative Clause Dependencies in Norwegian. Full text in Research Archive

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