No description available.

No description available.

The diploma thesis is a part of a good enough sentence processing research. In the theoretical part, I describe the origin of this approach and main research areas - garden- path sentences and noncanonical sentences. The practical part of the thesis introduces three experiments which partially replicate experiments of F. Ferreira (2003), results of these experiments, interpretation and comparation to the results of experiments in English. The Czech results show that Czech speakers unlike English speakers tend to use only heuristic of plausibility and do not use the NVN strategy.

It has long been theorized that, after the so-called critical period has passed, acquiring language becomes a more difficult enterprise. While general differences between adult second language (L2) learners and normally developed child (L1) acquirers have been more or less empirically established, a strand of recent L2 accounts have focused on the specific locus of these differences. The main goal of this dissertation project is to test the predictions of one such account: Clahsen and Felser's Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser 2006a, 2006b). The SSH places emphasis on the empirical testing of native/non-native language processing asymmetries, which are argued to be due to less detailed L2 grammatical representations. This dissertation tests the predictions of the SSH using a long-distance dependency: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in L2 Spanish. The study includes on-line and an off-line tasks, which were completed by a control group of native speakers of Spanish and an experimental group constituted by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language was English. In view of the well-known fact that L2 learning outcomes vary widely across individuals, a secondary goal of this dissertation project is to determine whether variability in individual learning abilities, such as inhibitory control and statistical learning predicts variability in L2 learning. Part of L2 learning involves detecting the probabilistic patterns of a language (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), such that individuals who are better pattern learners may be better able to learn the structural regularities of the L2 input. Results were analyzed in order to determine whether the predictions of the SSH could account for the patterns present in the data. These results suggest that although the acquisition of long-distance dependencies is a protracted process, both intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish could anticipate (predict) a syntactic element based in previously occurring cues. Thus, these results fail to support the predictions of the SSH. In terms of individual differences, overall, neither statistical learning nor inhibitory control appear to modulate the on-line processing of this particular long-distance dependency in Spanish.

A language comprehension mechanism that immediately starts processing language as it is encountered is typically thought of as one that speeds and facilitates spoken language comprehension. However, there exist cases where the earliest parts of a word or phrase encode information that is somewhat at odds with the remainder of the word or phrase in full. Examples of these "potentially misleading" cases include compound words where the initial subpart of the compound belongs to a different syntactic category than the entire compound (e.g., "popcorn", "greyhound"), or noun phrases where the initial element of the phrase signals perceptual properties possessed by the referent of the noun phrase (e.g., some Chinese Cantonese classifier-noun phrases). Using a visual-world methodology, this dissertation explores the kinds of unintended or "impulsive" activation that are triggered when listeners encounter such cases, as well as how syntactic and contextual cues can constraining this impulsive activation. Experiment 1 examines whether hearing compound subparts (e.g., "pop-" in "popcorn") activates conceptual associates across syntactic categories, and Experiment 2 examines whether this activation is moderated by listeners' expectations about the syntactic structure of the sentences they encounter. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the processing of compounds whose initial subparts correspond to colour terms (e.g., "greyhound"). Experiment 3 explores whether these colour subparts trigger the activation of phrasal-level descriptions of non-target objects in the visual display, and whether this activation is influenced by the presence/absence of motivation to use colour descriptions when naming screen objects. Experiment 4 further explores whether a perceptual mismatch between a target object and the colour term in its name increases this impulsive activation. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates whether listeners use the perceptual information encoded in pre-nominal classifiers in Cantonese Chinese to guide their consideration of referential candidates whose perceptual properties do or do not match the classifier semantics. The findings from this dissertation point to the highly interactive nature of spoken language comprehension, suggesting that the kinds of impulsive activation under current discussion are rampant and automatic, but can also be suppressed to varying degrees by the syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues available to the listener.

This dissertation investigates two facts about language processing. The Good Enough Approach claims that language users do not form a fully detailed representation of the input unless the task at hand requires it. On the other hand it has been shown that language users display internal preferences when they are faced with ambiguous input, as to what direction disambiguation should take. It has been proposed that these preferences are based on previous experience with similar inputs. This thesis investigates these two issues using tools from the fields of decision making and reinforcement learning. Specifically feedback and payoffs associated with sentence interpretations are manipulated to explore reading behavior, understood as a process of information seeking, and disambiguation choices. In four eye-tracking-reading experiments, the experimental stimuli are sentences containing a relative clause attachment ambiguity. Experiment 1 investigates whether the combination of the degree of ambiguity of a sentence and the possible payoffs, affect people’s reading times for the potentially ambiguous parts of a sentence, as well as their disambiguation choices. Experiment 2 investigates the role of feedback in such processes, a combination related to expected utility maximization. Experiment 3 studies how participants learn from feedback under risky or non-risky conditions. The last experiment investigates whether participants adjust their responses to evidence provided by feedback even overriding their internal initial bias towards a default response. / text

A language comprehension mechanism that immediately starts processing language as it is encountered is typically thought of as one that speeds and facilitates spoken language comprehension. However, there exist cases where the earliest parts of a word or phrase encode information that is somewhat at odds with the remainder of the word or phrase in full. Examples of these "potentially misleading" cases include compound words where the initial subpart of the compound belongs to a different syntactic category than the entire compound (e.g., "popcorn", "greyhound"), or noun phrases where the initial element of the phrase signals perceptual properties possessed by the referent of the noun phrase (e.g., some Chinese Cantonese classifier-noun phrases). Using a visual-world methodology, this dissertation explores the kinds of unintended or "impulsive" activation that are triggered when listeners encounter such cases, as well as how syntactic and contextual cues can constraining this impulsive activation. Experiment 1 examines whether hearing compound subparts (e.g., "pop-" in "popcorn") activates conceptual associates across syntactic categories, and Experiment 2 examines whether this activation is moderated by listeners' expectations about the syntactic structure of the sentences they encounter. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the processing of compounds whose initial subparts correspond to colour terms (e.g., "greyhound"). Experiment 3 explores whether these colour subparts trigger the activation of phrasal-level descriptions of non-target objects in the visual display, and whether this activation is influenced by the presence/absence of motivation to use colour descriptions when naming screen objects. Experiment 4 further explores whether a perceptual mismatch between a target object and the colour term in its name increases this impulsive activation. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates whether listeners use the perceptual information encoded in pre-nominal classifiers in Cantonese Chinese to guide their consideration of referential candidates whose perceptual properties do or do not match the classifier semantics. The findings from this dissertation point to the highly interactive nature of spoken language comprehension, suggesting that the kinds of impulsive activation under current discussion are rampant and automatic, but can also be suppressed to varying degrees by the syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues available to the listener.

[pt] Esta dissertação tem por objetivo analisar como ocorre a interação entre informações de ordens linguística e visual em experimentos de compreensão de linguagem. Sentenças do português nas vozes ativa e passiva e com verbos de perspectiva (perseguir/fugir) foram analisadas a partir da técnica de comparação sentença-imagem, com manipulação de posição ocupada na imagem pelo personagem correspondente ao sujeito da sentença (esquerda vs. direita) e também do papel temático (agente/fonte vs. paciente/alvo) de um dos personagens sobre o qual recaía um recurso de manipulação de atenção visual. Do ponto de vista teórico, proble-matizou-se a interação entre conteúdos proposicionais oriundos do processamento visual e linguístico com base em uma articulação entre a faculdade da linguagem no sentido amplo (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002) e a teoria da modularidade da mente (Fodor, 1983). Os resultados de dois experimentos realizados com falantes de português sugerem que, no mapeamento sentença-imagem, a posição do personagem correspondente ao sujeito não parece ser um fator relevante, a não ser em estruturas mais complexas, como no caso de sentenças envolvendo verbos de perspectiva em que o papel temático do sujeito não é prototípico. Em relação a papel temático, o fato de o foco atencional numa imagem estar sobre um elemento que corresponde a um sujeito com papel prototípico de agente parece facilitar o proces-samento. Quanto aos tipos de estrutura, como já verificado na literatura psicolin-guística, estruturas ativas parecem ser menos complexas do que passivas e facilitam o mapeamento visual. Quanto à expressão de perspectiva, verbos de perspectiva que empreendem um sujeito paciente/alvo parecem demandar maior custo de pro-cessamento, possivelmente em função de questões de acesso e representação lexical associadas a esses verbos. / [en] This dissertation aims to analyze how the interface between linguistic and visual information occurs based on language comprehension experiments. Active and passive voice sentences, as well as perspective predicates were analyzed using a sentence-image verification technique. The position of the characters representing the subject were manipulated (left-right orientation), and so were their theme roles (agent/source vs. patient/target) by means of attention manipulation. The proposi-tional theory, a relation between the faculty of language in the broad sense (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002) and the modularity of mind theory (Fodor, 1983) were presented so as to explain how the interface between linguistic and visual information occurs. Our experiments were carried out with Portuguese speakers, and results indicate that during sentence-image mapping, left-right orientation does not seem to be a relevant factor, except for more complex structures, such as perspec-tive predicates where the subject s theme role is not prototypical. As for theme roles, the attention manipulation on the subject character seems to facilitate lan-guage processing. As for sentence types, active voice sentences seem to be pro-cessed more easily than passive ones. Perspective predicates whose subjects take a passive/target role seem to demand higher processing costs, possibly because of lexical access and representation.

The goal of this thesis is three-fold: to examine complementation in Balinese from typological, syntactic, and cognitive perspectives. This thesis contributes to typological studies of complementation by providing a descriptive account of the distinguishing syntactic properties of four types of Balinese clausal complements: sentence-like (s-like), Subject Control (SC), Object Control (OC), and Raising complements. The data presented in this thesis demonstrate the clausal complement in Balinese can be differentiated through the kinds of elements that can be admitted within the complements: the type of complementizer, aspectual auxiliaries, modals, temporal specifications, and overt subjects. The theoretical aspect of this thesis is the application of Minimalist theory to account for the syntactic structure of Balinese monoclausal and biclausal constructions. This thesis also addresses a theoretical problem related to the syntactic structure of complementation within Generative syntax: finiteness. The presence of modals, aspectual auxiliaries, and the temporal specification of the complement do not signify finiteness in Balinese. Instead, finiteness in Balinese is marked by the licensing of overt subjects in the clausal complement, following the argument made by Kurniawan & Davies (2015), based on the evidence provided through the comparison of control complements and their subjunctive sentence-like complement counterparts. The cognitive processing of Balinese complementation is investigated through two sentence processing experiments with the goals of understanding how ambiguous Crossed Control Construction (CCC) sentences are processed in comparison to the processing of unambiguous Subject Control (SC) sentences and Raising sentences. The self-paced reading experiment focuses on the comparison of reading times for the verbs in these three types of sentences when the animacy of the subject is manipulated (i.e. animate or inanimate clause-initial DP). The results suggest that CCC sentences are processed differently than the SC and Raising sentences. The second experiment aims at investigating the effect of discourse context on the interpretation of the ambiguous CCC sentences. The results show the influence of context that primes subject control interpretation on the processing of Balinese SC and CC sentences.

No description available.