Brian Dillon will be presenting a talk at JHU Cognitive Science this Thursday Feb. 15th. The title and abstract are below.

A new argument for co-active parses during language comprehension

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is parallel (i.e. it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or serial (i.e. it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question has proven difficult to address for both theoretical and methodological reasons (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). In this talk, I will present joint work with Matt Wagers (UCSC), Caren Rotello (UMass), and Caroline Andrews (UMass) that reassesses this question from a novel perspective. To address this question, we investigated the ambiguity advantage effect, which is the finding that ambiguous sentences are processed more easily than unambiguous sentences in reading (Traxler, Pickering & Clifton, 1998). We investigated this effect using a speeded acceptability judgment task. We adopted a Signal Detection Theoretic approach to the data to determine whether speeded judgment responses were conditioned on one or multiple syntactic analyses. To link these results to incremental parsing models, we further developed formal models to quantitatively evaluate how serial and parallel parsing models should impact perceived sentence acceptability in our task. Our results suggest that speeded acceptability judgments are jointly conditioned on multiple parses of the input, a finding that is overall more consistent with parallel parsing models than serial models. Our study thus provides a new argument for co-active parses during language comprehension.