Author: m3mejia

The LCL features a guest speaker, Petra Mišmaš from the University of Nova Gorica, coming to present on adjective ordering at our next lab meeting on April 23rd at 10AM in APM4452.

Abstract:

The talk builds on an old observation that the order of attributive adjectives is universal (see for example Hetzron 1978, Sproat and Shih 1991, etc.). This also holds for adjectives for size, shape and color which seem to universally come in the order size > shape > color. One account of such adjective ordering restrictions was offered by the cartographic approach to syntax, see for example Cinque & Rizzi (2008) for an overview of the cartographic program. The core idea of this approach is that phrases consist from lexical heads which are dominated by hierarchies of functional projections. Crucially, the order of functional projections in the hierarchies is argued to be universal. This also holds for the noun phrase in which functional projections host, among other material, adjectives (Cinque 1994, Scott 2002). This means that the order of adjectives is universal because adjectives are hosted by functional projections which appear in a universal hierarchy. Based on this, the focus of the talk will be on the adjectives for size, shape and color as these adjectives will be used to investigate the possibility of a cognitive basis of the universal hierarchy of functional projections.

Following Cinque & Rizzi (2008) and Ramchand & Svenonius (2014), general cognition will be considered as a possible source of the universal hierarchy of functional projections. Specifically, I will report on a series of experiments which are a result of joint work with Rok Žaucer and Franc Lanko Marušič and are a part of an ongoing project Probing the cognitive basis of the cartographic hierarchy of functional projections in the noun phrase (J6-7282) financed by the Slovenian Research Agency and conducted at the University of Nova Gorica. These experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that if the universal hierarchy is dictated by general-cognition restrictions, then the order of projections hosting adjectives should be reflected in various non-linguistic cognitive processes. In the talk, I will report on the results of these experiments as well as ongoing research.

Hot off the presses! Eva has a new paper in Psychology of Learning and Motivation about the relationship between grammar and event construal.

Abstract:
The most fundamental function of language is to enable people to share mental models of their worlds. For a comprehender, the given mental model she is building will be shaped by the lexical items, and also by the syntactic structures, that a speaker is using. In this chapter, I review literature that unearths the mental models formed by comprehenders, based on the grammatical structure they encounter, as mutually informative for both linguistic theory and event and object cognition. This chapter uses the well-studied case of light verb constructions and reviews data from a range of experimental studies that investigated how linguistic structure shapes core aspects of mental models: the conceptualization of event participants, and temporal structure in events.

The Language Comprehension Lab will give a talk and present a poster at this year’s South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) in Konstanz, Germany.

“Peeling oranges in Hindi: Ergative case-marking as cue in real-time event construal”
Poster by Eva Wittenberg and Ashwini Vaidya

“Frequency regulates argument sharing effects in Hindi light verb constructions”
Talk by Ashwini Vaidya and Eva Wittenberg

The Language Comprehension Lab will be presenting two posters at this year’s CUNY:

“The mess reveals the system: People use top-down cues to resolve errors in contexts with highly random noise, but not with highly structured noise”
by Suhas Arehalli and Eva Wittenberg

“This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension”
by Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira and Eva Wittenberg

A Chancellor’s Research Excellence (CRES) grant has been recently awarded to Eva Wittenberg for the project “Developing eye-tracking software for psycholinguistic research in diverse populations.” The scholarship will go to Suhas Arehalli, a member of our lab majoring in Computer Science. Go team!

The Language Comprehension Lab is having two talks at the AMLaP-Asia 2018 conference in Hyderabad, India:

“This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension”
Talk by Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira and Eva Wittenberg

“Frequency effects modulate argument sharing effects in Hindi LVCs”
Talk by Ashwini Vaidya and Eva Wittenberg

The California Meeting on Psycholinguistics is being held at UCLA on December 2nd-3rd, and our lab will be there to give three talks:

This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension.
Talk by Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira, & Eva Wittenberg.

Subcategorization preferences of verbs reveal syntactic processing in evoked intracranial potentials.
Talk by Adam Morgan, Erik Kaestner, Victor S. Ferreira, Meilin Zhan, & Eric Halgren.

The mess reveals the system: People use top-down cues to resolve errors in contexts with highly random noise, but not with highly structured noise.
Talk by Suhas Arehalli & Eva Wittenberg.

Abstract:

Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic
representation. But we don’t think that the existing results provide strong
support for Branigan & Pickering’s (B&P’s) model, largely because the
priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would
suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools
available, and linguists are increasingly making use of them.

Read the commentary here!