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Articles 1 - 30 of 43
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer
The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer
Doctoral Dissertations
Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …
What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky
What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky
Doctoral Dissertations
Language users predictively preactivate lexical units that appear to the comprehen- der to be likely to surface. Despite ample language experience and grammatical competence, it appears that language users tend to preactivate verbs in some contexts, called role-reversal contexts, that would create plausibility violations if they were to actually appear; these verbs assign thematic roles to their arguments in such a way that it leads to implausibility. These anomalous predictions provide a window into the mechanisms underlying lexical preactivation and are the case study that this dissertation focuses in on. This dissertation is an exploration of what linguistic information is …
Visual, Lexical, And Syntactic Effects On Failure To Notice Word Transpositions: Evidence From Behavioral And Eye Movement Data, Kuan-Jung Huang
Visual, Lexical, And Syntactic Effects On Failure To Notice Word Transpositions: Evidence From Behavioral And Eye Movement Data, Kuan-Jung Huang
Masters Theses
Evidence of systematic misreading has been taken to argue that language processing is noisy, and that readers take noise into consideration and therefore sometimes interpret sentences non-literally (rational inference over a noisy channel). The present study investigates one specific misreading phenomenon: failure to notice word transpositions in a sentence. While this phenomenon can be explained by rational inference, it also has been argued to arise due to parallel lexical processing. The study explored these two accounts. Visual, lexical, and syntactic properties of the two transposed words were manipulated in three experiments. Failure to notice the transposition was more likely when …
There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews
There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation addresses the relationship between hierarchical syntactic structure and memory in language processing of individual sentences. Hierarchical syntactic structure is a key part of human languages and language processing but its integration with memory has been uneasy ever since Sachs (1967) demonstrated that the syntactic structure of individual sentences is lost in explicit sentence recall tasks much faster than other linguistic information (lexical, semantic, etc.). Nonetheless, psycholinguists have continued to draw on memory in syntactic processing theories, in part due to (i) the explanatory power that memory can give to sentence processing hypotheses, and (ii) the conflicting results that …
Shifting The Perspectival Landscape: Methods For Encoding, Identifying, And Selecting Perspectives, Carolyn Jane Anderson
Shifting The Perspectival Landscape: Methods For Encoding, Identifying, And Selecting Perspectives, Carolyn Jane Anderson
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions. Perspective, or point-of-view, encompasses an individual’s thoughts, perceptions, and location. Many expressions in natural language have components of their meanings that shift depending on whose perspective they are evaluated against. In this dissertation, I explore two sets of questions relating to perspective sensitivity. The first set of questions relate to how perspective is encoded in the semantics of perspectival expressions. The second set of questions relate to how conversation participants treat perspectival expressions: the speaker’s selection of a perspective and the listener’s identification of the speaker’s perspective. In Part I, …
Talking About Her(Self): Ambiguity Avoidance And Principle B. A Theoretical And Psycholinguistic Investigation Of Romanian Pronouns, Rudmila-Rodica Ivan
Talking About Her(Self): Ambiguity Avoidance And Principle B. A Theoretical And Psycholinguistic Investigation Of Romanian Pronouns, Rudmila-Rodica Ivan
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation answers a deceivingly simple question: why can her in Hermione talked about her refer to the sentence subject in Romanian, but not in English? The Romanian facts, which are surprising for both classic and competition-based accounts of the Binding Theory over the last 40 odd years, bring us to the following overarching question: what are the constraints on pronominal reference? To address these main questions, I carry out a psycholinguistic investigation of Romanian pronouns and argue that the distribution and interpretation of pronominal forms is jointly determined by pragmatic and morphosyntactic constraints. I discuss evidence from four experiments, …
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into …
Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel
Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the role of Focus-sensitivity for a typology of presupposition triggers. The central hypothesis is that Focus-sensitive triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence from two borne out predictions. First, Focus-sensitive triggers are sensitive to the salience of the antecedent satisfying their presupposition, as operationalized via the Question Under Discussion, and lead to interference-type effects, while triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are indifferent to the QUD-structure. Second, Focus-sensitive triggers are harder to globally accommodate than triggers lacking …
The Acquisition Of Np-Trace In English, Michiko Terada
The Acquisition Of Np-Trace In English, Michiko Terada
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
The Acquisition Of Passive With Instrumental Prepositional Phrases In English, Xiaoping Teng
The Acquisition Of Passive With Instrumental Prepositional Phrases In English, Xiaoping Teng
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Deterministic Parsing And The Verb Raising Construction In German And Dutch, Hotze Rullmann
Deterministic Parsing And The Verb Raising Construction In German And Dutch, Hotze Rullmann
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
The Parsing Of Anaphor Binding & Levels Of Representation, Bernadette Plunkett
The Parsing Of Anaphor Binding & Levels Of Representation, Bernadette Plunkett
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
The Early Interpretation Of Expletive Pronouns, Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux, Sabina Aurilio
The Early Interpretation Of Expletive Pronouns, Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux, Sabina Aurilio
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
The Syntax And Processing Of Sentential Subjects, Jaye Padgett
The Syntax And Processing Of Sentential Subjects, Jaye Padgett
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Comprehending Sentences Containing Traces, John S. Huitema
Comprehending Sentences Containing Traces, John S. Huitema
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Processing Of Wh-Dependencies In A Null Subject Language: Referential And Non-Referential Whs., Marica De Vincenzi
Processing Of Wh-Dependencies In A Null Subject Language: Referential And Non-Referential Whs., Marica De Vincenzi
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Dissecting The Adjective Ordering Constraint In English, Juli Carter
Dissecting The Adjective Ordering Constraint In English, Juli Carter
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Formal Semantics Of Telegraphic Speech, Virgina Brennan
Formal Semantics Of Telegraphic Speech, Virgina Brennan
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Front Matter, Bernadette Plunkett
Front Matter, Bernadette Plunkett
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
From Cognition To Thematic Roles: The Projection Principle As An Acquisition Mechanism, Dan Finer, Thomas Roeper
From Cognition To Thematic Roles: The Projection Principle As An Acquisition Mechanism, Dan Finer, Thomas Roeper
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
When Comprehension Difficulty Improves Memory For Text, Edward J. O'Brien, Jerome L. Myers
When Comprehension Difficulty Improves Memory For Text, Edward J. O'Brien, Jerome L. Myers
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Anaphora And Discourse Structure, Barbara C. Malt
Anaphora And Discourse Structure, Barbara C. Malt
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Complementizers, Markedness, And Readjustment In Children's Comprehension Of Relatives And Clefts, Helen Goodluck
Complementizers, Markedness, And Readjustment In Children's Comprehension Of Relatives And Clefts, Helen Goodluck
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Thematic Relations In Parsing, Lyn Frazier, Charles Clifton Jr
Thematic Relations In Parsing, Lyn Frazier, Charles Clifton Jr
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
The Role Of Context In Resolving Syntactic Ambiguity, Fernanda Ferreira
The Role Of Context In Resolving Syntactic Ambiguity, Fernanda Ferreira
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Identifying Phonemes And Syllables: Evidence From People Who Rapidly Reorder Speech, Nelson Cowan, Martin D. S. Braine, Lewis A. Leavitt
Identifying Phonemes And Syllables: Evidence From People Who Rapidly Reorder Speech, Nelson Cowan, Martin D. S. Braine, Lewis A. Leavitt
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Front Matter, T. Daniel Seely
Front Matter, T. Daniel Seely
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui
Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the real-time comprehension and final interpretation of object pronouns in Vietnamese, a language in which reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal forms have overlapping meanings. It addresses the questions of whether and how Principle B is applied as a structural constraint to determine the appropriate antecedent for pronouns in the language. The central argument is that Vietnamese speakers rely on two distinct mechanisms to resolve anaphoric relations: Within a pronoun's local domain, even though coreference is highly permissive, binding is strictly prohibited. Results from three two-alternative forced choice and three self-paced reading experiments show consistent profiles for both the …
Computing Agreement In A Mixed System, Sakshi Bhatia
Computing Agreement In A Mixed System, Sakshi Bhatia
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation develops a comprehensive response to the question of how agreement is computed in Hindi-Urdu – a language with a mixed agreement system where the verb can agree with a subject or an object depending on the structural context. This dissertation covers new empirical and theoretical ground in two domains. First, I identify three kinds of atypical agreement patterns which are not accounted for under traditional approaches Hindi-Urdu agreement -- verb agreement with the nominal component of Noun-Verb complex predicates, long distance agreement of embedding Adjective-Verb predicates with embedded infinitive clause objects, and copular agreement in identity copula structures. …
When Errors Aren't: How Comprehenders Selectively Violate Binding Theory, Shayne Sloggett
When Errors Aren't: How Comprehenders Selectively Violate Binding Theory, Shayne Sloggett
Doctoral Dissertations
It has been claimed that comprehenders use the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1986) to restrict the search for a reflexive’s antecedent in early stages of comprehension (Dillon, Mishler, Sloggett, & Phillips, 2013; Sturt, 2003; Nicol & Swinney, 1989) However, recent findings challenge this view, demonstrating that comprehenders occasionally access antecedents on the basis of their match with a reflexive’s morphosyntactic features (Chen, Jäger, & Vasishth, 2012; Patil, Lewis, & Vasishth, 2016, Parker, & Phillips, 2017). In this dissertation, I investigate the source of this ’grammatical fallibility’ in the real-time application of Principle A of the Binding Theory. Specifically, I ask whether …