Experiments (sentence processing, pragmatics)

Question 1

Eye tracking reading of garden path sentences (Frazier and Rayner 1982)

Answer 1

Eye movements were recorded as subjects read sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities
…

Question 2

Eye movements and perceptual span (Rayner 1986)

Answer 2

What do eyes register during reading?

Perception is only during fixation

Question 3

Shadowing (Marslen - Wilson 1973)

Answer 3

Is parsing informed by our world knowledge?
Normal sentence: The new peace terms have been announced. They call for the unconditional withdrawal of all the enemy forces.
Semantically anomalous sentence: The new peace terms have been announced. They call for the unconditional universe of all the enemy forces.

The word withdrawal/universe: disrupted or not disrupted
Withdrawal -> withdewel corrected often
Universe -> unopverse hardly ever corrected

Incremental interpretation, hence restoration of disrupted words only in normal condition

Question 4

Visual information integrated during reading (Tanenhaus et al 1995)

Answer 4

Put the apple on the towel …
NP and VP attachment
a. Put the apple on the towel in the box (locally ambiguous)
b. Put the apple that is on the towel in the box (unambiguous)

Conclusion: NP attachment must be interpretational justified to be considered; readers use visual info and interpretation constraints as a guide in parsing; so we use semantic knowledge, visual info, discourse context during parsing

Question 5

Thematic role (not) relevant for processing

Answer 5

Animate or inanimate
Reduced or unreduced (that is)
We use semantic info in animate reduced, want sneller gegardenpathed, omdat onderwerp agent kan zijn

Question 6

An experiment on pragmatic reasoning in incremental interpretation using eye movements over visual scenes (Breheny et al 2013)

Answer 6

“In this paper we present a visual world study using a new interactive paradigm where two communicators (one confederate) describe visually-presented events to each other as their eye movements are monitored. In this way, we directly compare the suitability of these three kinds of model. We show hearers can access contextually specific particularised implicatures in on-line comprehension. Moreover, we show that in doing so, hearers are sensitive to the relevant mental states of the speaker.”

Question 7

Acquisition of pragmatics and implicatures (Papafragou et al 2013)

Answer 7

some can still mean all (horses and fence example)
scalar implicatures the choice of weaker characterization suggest none of the stronger characterizations in the scale hold
lack of theory of mind (ToM)

Question 8

Reasoning in language reference games (Degen and Franke 2012)

Answer 8

Study with monsters
In this paper we set out to answer a simple question: are listeners and speakers Gricean at the individual level or only at the population level?