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A Memory-Based Explanation Of Antecedent-Ellipsis Mismatches New Insights From Computational Modeling, Daniel Parker

Arts & Sciences Articles

An active question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the parser and grammar reflect distinct cognitive systems. Recent evidence for a distinct-systems view comes from cases of ungrammatical but acceptable antecedent-ellipsis mismatches (e.g., *Tom kicked Bill, and Matt was kicked by Tom too.). The finding that these mismatches show varying degrees of acceptability has been presented as evidence for the use of extra-grammatical parsing strategies that restructure a mismatched antecedent to satisfy the syntactic constraints on ellipsis (Arregui et al. 2006; Kim et al. 2011). In this paper, I argue that it is unnecessary to posit a special class of …

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: New Evidence For Selective Agreement Attraction Effects In Comprehension, Daniel Parker, Adam An

Arts & Sciences Articles

Research on memory retrieval during sentence comprehension suggests that similarity-based interference is mediated by the grammatical function of the distractor. For instance, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) observed interference during retrieval for subject-verb thematic binding when the distractor occurred as an oblique argument inside a prepositional phrase (PP), but not when it occurred as a core argument in direct object position. This contrast motivated the proposal that constituent encodings vary in the distinctiveness of their memory representations based on an argument hierarchy, which makes them differentially susceptible to interference. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested. The present …

Stress Avoidance In Hiatus, Anya Hogoboom

Arts & Sciences Articles

Segment-based syllable weight has been proposed to be calculated by either rhyme segments (McCarthy, 1979) or by intervals (Steriade, 2012). An interval is defined as the vocalic material of a syllable and all following segmental material until the vowel of the following syllable. The two theories parse segments into the same domains in two cases: word-finally,1 and for the first vowel of two adjacent vowels in different syllables, i.e., in hiatus. While the weight domain is the same for the two theories in cases of hiatus (consisting of just a short vowel, ‘V’), the categorization of weight is different. While …

Introduction To "Lexical Borrowing And Deborrowing In Spanish In New York City", Rachel Varra

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City provides a sociodemographic portrait of lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City.

The volume offers new and important insights into research on lexical borrowing. In particular, it presents empirical data obtained through quantitative analysis to answer the question of who is most likely to use English lexical borrowings while speaking Spanish, to address the impact that English has on Spanish as spoken in the city and to identify the social factors that contribute to language change.

The book also provides an empirical, corpus-based-approach to distinguishing between borrowing and other …

Durational Cues To Stress, Final Lengthening, And The Perception Of Rhythm, Anya Hogoboom

Arts & Sciences Articles

Binary stress languages have a well-known asymmetry between their tolerance of initial versus final lapse; the former being extremely rare and the latter being quite common. Lunden (to appear) proposes that final lengthening plays a role in this asymmetry, as the additional inherent phonetic duration of the final syllable can contribute to the continuation of a perceived rhythm, even in the absence of actual final stress. She notes this effect of final lengthening should only be available in languages that use duration as a cue to stress. However, some languages are described as having different cues to primary and secondary …