Lecture 5: Sentence Processing II Flashcards
1
Q
Kamide et al. (2003) (5)
A
- Eye-tracking study about people’s predictions.
- Participants looked at an array of pictures.
- The girl will ride [the carousel/ the motorbike]; ride → looked at carousel more.
- The man will ride [the carousel/the motorbike]; ride → looked at motorbike more.
- People looked at rideable objects than non-rideable objects in general.
2
Q
Altmann & Kamide (2007) (5)
A
- Another eye-tracking study about people’s expectations.
- Participants looked at a picture of a man standing in front of a full glass of beer and empty glass of wine.
- The man will drink [the beer/the wine]; will drink → the beer.
- The man has drunk [the beer/the wine]; has drunk → the wine.
- Participants considered the tense/temporal information when making their predictions.
3
Q
role of memory in non-local dependencies (3)
A
- Need to store info in WM in order to understand wh-questions.
- e.g. Who did Mary see __?
Mary saw who?
Mary Saw John.- Who must be interpreted as the direct object of see, which doesn’t come until later.
4
Q
filled-gap effects (4)
A
When we hear a wh-filler:
- We infer that a particular position of the sentence contains a gap.
- We look for this gap, while holding onto the wh-Filler in working memory.
- Try to find a gap as soon as possible (to relieve memory).
- Note: this gap isn’t marked in any way; we have to rely on our knowledge of how well-formed sentences appear.
5
Q
Stowe (1986) (8)
A
- Self-paced reading task; measured reading times to determine where participants had processing difficulties.
- IF-CLAUSE (a control condition in wh-filler studies): My brother wanted to know if Ruth will bring us home to Mom at Christmas.
- WH-SUBJ (when the subject is the wh-filler): My brother wanted to know who __ will bring us home to Mom at Christmas.
- WH-OBJ (when the object is the wh-filler): My brother wanted to know who Ruth will bring __ home to Mom at Christmas.
- WH-POBJ (when the prepositional object is the wh-filler): My brother wanted to know who Ruth will bring (__) us home to __ at Christmas.
- This is the critical condition, the “filled gap” condition.
- Since there’s already a direct object in the sentence—where the (__) is—participants slowed down after reading us.
- They had to put the filler back in working memory and continue processing the sentence.
6
Q
object vs. subject relative clause (2)
A
- object relative: e.g. The senator who the reporter spotted __ shouted.
- subject relative: e.g. The reporter who __ spotted the senator shouted.
7
Q
subject processing advantage (4)
A
- Subject relative clauses are typically easier to process than object relative clauses.
- Subject relative clauses:
- Produce faster reaction times;
- Result in greater accuracy in comprehension questions;
- Given a globally ambiguous string, people prefer to assign subject interpretation.
8
Q
working memory hypothesis (2)
A
- Proposes that, due to the linear order of words (subject–object), the dependency is shorter for subject relative clauses than for object relative clauses.
- i.e. It’s less of a burden on working memory.
9
Q
subject superiority hypothesis (4)
A
- Proposes that subjects are naturally “more accessible” to the parser, or subjects are structurally superior to objects.
- i.e. Grammar counts them as more important—e.g. verb agreement.
- Object relative clauses are more structurally complex.
- Subjects are more discourse-prominent and receives stronger mental representation.
10
Q
reading span test (3)
A
- A behavioural test intended to measure an individual’s verbal working memory.
- Individuals read a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory.
- The number of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual’s memory span.
11
Q
King & Just (1991) (6)
A
- Provided evidence for both working memory hypothesis and subject superiority hypothesis.
- Participants were measured on their WM using a reading span task; then split into two groups: high and low WM span.
- Participants read either subject or object relative clauses.
- The low WM span participants went much slower in the critical regions of ORCs than SRCs.
- The subject superiority hypothesis predicts that object relative clauses will be more taxing for the parser; makes sense that people with lower WM span will perform poorer on ORCs.
- But both groups performed better with SRCs, suggesting that there’s still something easier to process about subjects.
12
Q
cognitive control or executive function (3)
A
- The goal-directed cognitive processes responsible for directing attention and supervising behavioural responses to stimuli.
- Underlies our ability to multitask.
- Differs greatly between individuals.
13
Q
Stroop test (4)
A
- Behavioural test in which subjects are required to name the color of the font that a word appears in while ignoring the (possibly conflicting) meaning of the word.
- Must suppress meaning of the word in cases where colour and lexical unit mismatch.
- People are slower at these trials and make more mistakes.
- Bilinguals tend to do better; more used to using their executive function to suppress one language when they use another.
14
Q
Trueswell et al. (1999) (7)
A
- “Put the frog on the napkin in the box.” Did the experiment with two referents, and measured the rate of error.
-
kindergarten-path effect: After experiencing a garden path effect, children only perform the right action less than half the time.
- They often perform the wrong action: first putting the frog on the empty napkin, then in the box.
- They were much worse at recovering from ambiguity.
- Adults only made errors <20% of the time with 1 referent, and <10% errors with 2 referents (i.e. are able to recover from ambiguity).
- Children demonstrated a lot more looks to the redundant napkin in both the ambiguous and unambiguous conditions, since relative clauses are quite complex sentences.
- Since children have lower cognitive control abilities than adults, this demonstrates how children are unable to suppress unintended meanings, and that these two mechanisms are related.
