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In Part One, three experiments investigated the effects of the surface structure of semantic illusion sentences upon semantic illusion rate (Chapters 3 to 6), but only a comparison of question and statements revealed any significant effects, with questions leading to more semantic illusion responses. To explore the implications of this lack of effect, a rating scale study was designed to provide an overview of how semantic illusion sentences compare to sentences used in ordinary discourse: semantic illusion type sentences were found to differ significantly from other sentences along a number of salient dimensions. In Part Two, three further experiments related semantic illusions to problem solving and examined the processing requirements of semantic illusions. Findings indicated that semantic illusions are subject to a kind of ‘functional fixedness’, which prevents thorough processing (Chapters 9 and 10). This may in part be explained by the load that semantic illusion sentences place on working memory, as was indicated by the results of two further experiments, which investigated the role that the different components of working memory play in semantic illusion processing (Chapter 11).

The Nature of Syntactic Gender Processing in Spanish: An ERP StudySyntactic gender as a lexical feature has been studied via picture-word interference paradigms in many languages. While effects have been found for noun phrase production in many languages, no effects have been found in Spanish, despite the fact that articles, nouns, and adjectives have a syntactic gender. Cubelli et al. (2005) found inhibitory effects in bare noun production in Italian which led to the hypothesis that such effects could be found for Spanish. Experiments 1 and 2 represented attempts replicate Cubelli et al.'s findings (Experiment 1 used an auditory distractor word and Experiment 2 a visual distractor), however no gender congruency effects were found. Experiment 3 attempted to generate congruency effects by requiring subjects to utilize gender-marked demonstratives and adjectives but still no effects were found. The lack of effects gave rise to the proposal that gender is not accessed during noun phrase production in Spanish and that the extreme regularity of the gender-marking system makes an article-plus-noun phrase more akin to a single lexical unit that can be accessed without an explicit synthetic process. Experiment 4 contrasted simple noun phrases that might be directly retrieved to constructions with long-distance dependencies, for which access to abstract gender features is relevant to parsing hierarchical sentence structure and aimed to distinguish these distinct cognitive processes via event-related potentials. The hypothesis was that a local gender violation in a sentence like "la piano" (the-fem piano-masc) would elicit a LAN as compared to the correct alternative, while a long-distance violation like "el piano que compré ayer es antigua" (the-masc piano-masc that I bought yesterday is antique-fem) would elicit a P600. All violations elicited a LAN and all violations involving adjacent segments elicited a P600; critically, the long-distance violation did not elicit a P600. It was concluded that the P600 reflects a repair process which occurs when such repair is not costly to the parser. Experiment 5 was a behavioral study using the stimuli from Experiment 4 with an error detection task which confirmed that subjects were sensitive to all error types.

This thesis presents an account of some of the mental mechanisms and processes that take the addressee from a linguistic input to the interpretation of that input. Because on-line interpretation involves our knowledge of language, the relation between input processing and grammar is evaluated. The full interpretation of a linguistic input also involves pragmatic, i.e. central cognitive processes, but these processes are the least well understood within psycholinguistics. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) gives us a way of making our understanding of these processes more explicit. However, Relevance theory claims turn out to be incompatible with psycholinguistic models which postulate an autonomous syntactic parser, such as the 'Garden-path' model. A review of the experimental literature reveals that the findings claimed to support the 'Garden-path' model do not in fact support it. Likewise, the principle of Lexical Preference, proposed to account for how verb subcategorization frames are accessed, turns out not to be supported by the experimental evidence. Full interpretation involves computing a conceptual representation, and an account is given of what constitutes conceptual structure. This leads to the proposal that verbs are represented as structured concepts. This view of verb representation together with Relevance theory can account for when arguments of verbs can be left implicit. Finally, an account is given of how the addressee computes the propositional form communicated by an utterance, by building hypotheses about the conceptual structure of the proposition on-line. These hypotheses are based on structural information stored under the concepts referred to by the utterance. This proposal can account for psycholinguistic research findings, with pragmatics playing an integral role in the explanations: it is no longer grafted onto the model as a psycholinguistic afterthought.

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This thesis contends that the human parser has a repair mechanism. It is further contended that the human parser uses this mechanism to alter previously built structure in the case of unexpected disambiguation of temporary syntactic ambiguity. This position stands in opposition to the claim that unexpected disambiguation of temporary syntactic ambiguity is accomplished by the usual first pass parsing routines, a claim that arises from the relatively extraordinary capabilities of computational parsers, capabilities which have recently been extended by hypothesis to be available to the human sentence processing mechanism. The thesis argues that, while these capabilities have been demonstrated in computational parsers, the human parser is best explained in the terms of a repair based framework, and that this argument is demonstrated by examining eye movement behaviour in reading. In support of the thesis, evidence is provided from a set of eye tracking studies of reading. It is argued that these studies show that eye movement behaviours at disambiguation include purposeful visual search for linguistically relevant material, and that the form and structure of these searches vary reliably according to the nature of the repairs that the sentences necessitate.

This study examines how Chinese speakers understand sentences describing events that have varying degrees of typicality. How the interpretation of typicality is obtained from linguistic input is not fully understood. In this study, I investigate the association of pairs of content words in order to determine their contribution to judgments of event typicality. The associations between words could influence the interpretation of event typicality. Two words that are not associated semantically, for example baby and wine, may be seen as an atypical combination. However, when these words are placed in a sentence context, the resulting sentences can be a typical scenario, such as the baby spilled the wine. Four offline judgment studies were conducted to obtain quantitative measurements of the association of word pairs and of judgments of event typicality in sentences. These studies demonstrated that noun pairs showed larger differences in their association ratings than those of noun-verb pairs. When the sentences containing the word pairs were judged, the association of the noun pair strongly influenced the sentence’s event typicality ratings, regardless of word order or of the typicality of the verb. Two online, word-by-word self-paced reading studies were conducted to examine whether judgments of word associations and event typicality are used in real-time sentence processing. The results showed that there was a slowdown in reading times at the critical regions when the noun pairs were atypical. The typicality of the verb did not result in a difference in reading times, regardless of the word order of the sentences, although offline judgment scores of event typicality were predictive of online reading times. The findings of these studies suggest that: (1) event typicality is more than the semantic association between words. Noun-noun and noun-verb associations contribute to event typicality but the association of two nouns has a more significant contribution and is not affected by an intervening word, (2) the typicality of verbs contributed to real-time sentence processing, insofar as the verbs contributed to the judged typicality of the events expressed by SVO and SOV clauses, and (3) in real-time sentence processing, regardless of the sentence’s word order, the association of nouns has greater impact on event typicality processing. This is not likely to be due simply to a priming effect between nouns, but rather also reflects the processing of the sentence’s event typicality. / text

This dissertation is a theoretical and experimental investigation of number marking in Yucatec Maya, a language in which number marking has different properties than better known Indo-European languages with inflectional plural marking and obligatory number agreement. The primary goal of this thesis is to propose a formal syntactic analysis of plural marking in Yucatec Maya in the nominal and verbal domains. I do this by examining the distribution and interpretation of the plural morpheme and by proposing an analysis within a Minimalist framework. The secondary goal is to investigate how the formal representation of plural marking interacts with real-time sentence processing mechanisms. I do this through timed translation experiments (and a picture description experiment) with bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish, two languages in which the formal representation of number marking and agreement differs. These experiments are tests of the formal syntactic analyses proposed in this thesis, and they examine the effect of language-particular syntax on sentence processing mechanisms. In the nominal domain, I argue that the plural marker is adjoined to the Determiner Phrase, rather than heading a Number Phrase, following the syntax of plural marking proposed by Wiltschko (2008). It merges as an adjunct to the DP, lacking the ability to change the label of the element with which it merges. This analysis explains the distributional and interpretational properties of plural marking as well as the otherwise peculiar lack of morphosyntactic persistence in certain conditions in an experimental translation task. I also propose an analysis of plural marking in the verbal domain and its relationship to word order. In verb-initial clauses, the aspect-mood particle is the main predicate in T⁰ which is φ-deficient. There is no Agree for number between the plural-marked full DP and verb due to the absence of C⁰ (Chomsky 2008). For DP-initial clauses, a DP bearing plural morphology moves to the CP domain, triggered by a topic or focus feature. The uninterpretable number feature on C⁰ probes via T⁰ for an interpretable valued feature in its domain (Chomsky 2001). This analysis predicts asymmetric number agreement in Yucatec Maya, which is tested experimentally.