The lab has four presentations this week, one at the First South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL), and three at AMLaP!

• How does case marking constrain event representations?
  Talk at SAFAL-1 by Eva Wittenberg, Mohit Gurumukhani and Ashwini Vaidya (please email Eva for slides!)
• Non-Linguistic Context Affects Processing of Ambiguous Speech
  Poster #313 by Daniel Kleinman, Rachel Ostrand, Adam Morgan, Mohit Gurumukhani, and Eva Wittenberg
• Multiple Meanings of Doubling Up: Mandarin Verbal Reduplication
  Poster #152 by Catherine Arnett and Eva Wittenberg
• Form-specific preferences of proforms and demonstratives referring to events
  Poster #213 by Joshua Wampler and Eva Wittenberg

We are pleased to announce that Eva received an IBM Research Award for studying how the COVID-19 pandemic impacts ambiguity resolution in language comprehension! As all good projects, this one comes from a good collaboration — here, with Rachel Ostrand, Dan Kleinman, and Adam Morgan!

Thanks IBM! Now, on to good data!

We’re so excited: Our paper on those structures that we wonder why English speakers produce them, a.k.a. resumptive pronouns, by alumnus extraordinaire Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor Ferreira, and Eva Wittenberg, has been accepted by Cognition!

Featuring a creative mix of methods (among others, the first eye-tracking data collected in this lab), we hammer home the point that when we study comprehension, it’s a good idea to also study interpretation!

A preprint can be found here, and here’s the abstract:

Language comprehension and production are generally assumed to use the same representations, but resumption poses a problem for this view. This structure is regularly produced, but judged highly unacceptable. Production-based solutions to this paradox explain resumption in terms of processing pressures, whereas the Facilitation Hypothesis suggests resumption is produced to help listeners comprehend. Previous research purported to support the Facilitation Hypothesis did not test its keystone prediction: that resumption improves accuracy of interpretation. Here, we test this prediction directly, controlling for factors that previous work did not. Results show that resumption in fact hinders comprehension in the same sentences that native speakers produced, a finding which replicated across four high-powered experiments with varying paradigms: sentence-picture matching (N= 300), self-paced reading (N= 96), visual world eye-tracking (N= 96), and multiple-choice comprehension question (N= 150).These findings are consistent with production-based accounts, indicating that comprehension and production may indeed share representations, although our findings point toward a limit on the degree of overlap. Methodologically speaking, the findings highlight the importance of measuring interpretation when studying comprehension.

We just received an Innovation Grant for Inclusive Research Excellence, to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic influences language comprehension throughout society, in an exciting ongoing project with our fabulous colleagues Rachel Ostrand, Dan Kleinman, and Adam Morgan!

We also received a Yankelovich Center Book Manuscript/Grant Proposal Improvement Grant to, well, improve a grant that’s to be submitted soon. Wish us luck!

The lab will virtually go to CogSci, presenting

Sheer Time Spent Expecting or Maintaining a Representation Facilitates Subsequent Retrieval during Sentence Processing

by Hossein Karimi, Michele Diaz & Eva Wittenberg.

Abstract: Previous research has shown that modified noun phrases (henceforth NPs) are subsequently retrieved faster than non-modified NPs. This effect is often called the “semantic complexity effect”. However, little is known about its mechanisms and underlying factors. In this study, we tested whether this effect is truly caused by the semantic information added by the modification, or whether it can be explained by the sheer amount of time that the processor spends expecting or maintaining an NP in the encoding phase. The results showed that time spent expecting or maintaining an NP can explain the effect over and above semantic and/or syntactic complexity. Our results challenge the current memory-based mechanisms for the modification effect such as the “distinctiveness” and “head-reactivation” accounts, and offer new and valuable insight into the memory processes during sentence comprehension.

It doesn’t even always come second when it should. Why?

In a new book chapter, we explore linguistic serialization options, specifically, topic and frame-setter expressions, and verbs in German, English, and Turkish! Fun experiments involving Playmobil™ included.

Wiese, Heike, Oncu, Mehmet Tahir, Muller, Hans G., Eva Wittenberg(2020). Verb Third in spoken German: A natural order of information, in: Woolfe et al. (eds). Rethinking Verb Second, ch. 29, pp.682-699. Oxford University Press.

While in the grand scheme of things, this is of course totally irrelevant, we are still happy to share some good news for a change:

So: Good news for our (temporarily closed) lab: Catherine received a Friends of the International Center summer grant to conduct research on Zhoushanese, a Chinese dialect; and Eva received a Division of Social Sciences research grant to investigate counterfactuals (like, “If I had bought toilet paper in February, I would have one fewer worry right now”).

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

The Language Comprehension Lab is thrilled to announce a very special guest: Hugh Rabagliati (Edinburgh) will talk at our lab meeting from 2:15-3pm on March 6th (AP&M 4452). 

All are welcome!

Learning dimensions of meaning
Words such as ‘but’ carry content that does not fit neatly into the traditional distinction between expressed and implicated meanings. This content is often abstract, it’s meta-linguistic, and it’s hard to describe: indeed, there’s still a messy debate about what sort of dimension of meaning ‘but’ actually carries. Yet anecdotally at least, learning to use these words does not appear to present much of a challenge for children: At least by the age of three, they not only say the word ‘but’ frequently, they use it appropriately, too. Here, however, I’ll present data that this early competence at production masks a striking difficulty at interpreting its meaning during comprehension. Experiments with both preschoolers and statistical language models suggest that these failures to comprehend ‘but’ arise from a difficulty inferring the concrete implications of a Question Under Discussion. Children’s struggles with ‘but’ may thus be part of a broader difficulty generating alternatives, with implications for our understanding of children’s semantic and pragmatic interpretation.

The lab will present two posters at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference:

• Wampler, Joshua & Wittenberg, Eva: Conceptual parallels between event and object reference in English: A new paradigm shows that demonstratives refer to more complex events
• Karimi, Hossein, Diaz, Michele, & Wittenberg, Eva: Explaining away the ease of retrieving “alleged Venezuelan communists”: Attention and time spent, not semantic complexity alone, predict reading times

See you in Amherst in March!

First-year grad student Catherine Arnett has just been awarded a Departmental Travel Grant, and a travel grant from the UCSD Graduate Students Division, to present her work on the verb phrase in different Chinese dialects at NACCL-32. Come hear her talk (“Conceptual effects of Verbal Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese”) at UConn in April!

Congrats, Catherine!