Category Archives: Psycholinguistics

UMass linguists @ 34th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference

The University of Pennsylvania will host the 34th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference virtually this year from March 4th-6th. Registration is free, so stop by to see what our students and alumni are up to this year! UMass linguists past, present, and future are presenting a lot of very interesting work.

Stephanie Rich and Matt Wagers will give a platform talk entitled Syntactic and semantic parallelism guides filler-gap processing in coordination.

In addition, there will be short 5 minute talks and discussions by:

Morwenna Hoeks, Maziar Toosarvandani and Amanda Rysling: Decomposing the focus effect: Evidence from reading.

David Potter and Katy Carlson. The structural source of English Subject Islands.

Anthony Yacovone, Paulina Piwowarczyk and Jesse Snedeker: It takes two the tango: Predictability and detectability affect processing of phrase structure errors

Rodica Ivan, Brian Dillon and Kyle Johnson: Choosing a Referring Expression: Intrasentential Ambiguity Avoidance in Romanian.

Jeremy Doiron and Shota Momma: Underlying clausal structure modulates lexical interference: Evidence from raising and control.

Shota Momma and Masaya Yoshida: Syntax guides sentence planning: Evidence from multiple dependency constructions.

Keir Moulton, Cassandra Chapman and Nayoun Kim: Predicting binding domains: Evidence from fronted auxiliaries and wh-predicates.

Jon Burnsky, Franziska Kretzschmar, Erika Mayer, Lisa Sanders and Adrian Staub: Dissociating Effects of Predictability, Preview and Visual Contrast on Eye Movements and ERPs.

Özge Bakay and Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz: Case interference and phrase lengths interact in processing Turkish center-embeddings.

Gwendolyn Rehrig and Fernanda Ferreira. Good-enough for all intensive purposes: Eggcorns and noisy channel processing.

Adina Camelia Bleotu and Brian Dillon. Pronouns attract in number but (much) less so in person. Evidence from Romanian.

Anthony Yacovone, Moshe Poliak, Harita Koya and Jesse Snedeker. ERP decoding shows bilinguals represent the language of a code-switch after lexical processing.

Christopher Hammerly, Brian Dillon and Adrian Staub. Prominence guides incremental interpretation: Lessons from obviation in Ojibwe.

Nayoun Kim, Keir Moulton and Daphna Heller. Processing embedded clauses in Korean: silent element or a dependency formation?

Kuan-Jung Huang and Adrian Staub. Limits on failure to notice word transpositions during sentence reading.https://www.cuny2021.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/CUNY_2021_abstract_125.pdf

Caroline Andrews. If Memory Doesn?t Serve: Timecourse of Syntactic Forgetting in Ellipsis and Recognition.

John Duff, Adrian Brasoveanu and Amanda Rysling. Task influences on lexical underspecification: Insights from the Maze and SPR.

Caren Rotello, Brian Dillon and Caroline Andrews. Multiverse analysis of eye-tracking data: Reexamining the ambiguity advantage effect.

Fernanda Ferreira, Gwendolyn Rehrig, Madison Barker, Eleonora Beier, Suphasiree Chantavarin, Beverly Cotter, Zhuang Qiu, Matthew Lowder and Hossein Karimi. Back to the Future: Do Influential Results from 1980s Psycholinguistics Replicate?

Mara Breen and Evelina Fedorenko. Self-reported inner speech salience moderates implicit prosody effects.

Nicholas Van Handel, Matthew Wagers and Amanda Rysling. Guiding Implicit Prosody with Delexicalized Melodies: Evidence from a Match/Mismatch Task.

Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi, Caroline Andrews, Sebastian Sauppe, Monique Flecken, Moritz Daum, Itziar Laka, Martin Meyer and Balthasar Bickel. Case marking influences the apprehension of briefly exposed events.

Madison Barker, Gwendolyn Rehrig and Fernanda Ferreira. But what can I do with it?: Speakers name interactable objects earlier in scene descriptions.

Nicholas Van Handel, Lalitha Balachandran, Stephanie Rich and Amanda Rysling. Singular vs. Plural Themselves: Evidence from the Ambiguity Advantage.

Daniela Mertzen, Brian Dillon, Ralf Engbert and Shravan Vasishth. An investigation of the time-course of syntactic and semantic interference in online sentence comprehension.

Alex Göbel has made it to McGill!

When we last heard from Alex Göbel, he had just defended his dissertation. He has since been let into Canada to start his postdoc position at McGill with Michael Wagner. He writes from his quarantine in Montreal:

I’ll be at McGill on a Feodor Lynen Fellowship, sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation. The research project is aimed at investigating the interaction between Focus-particles – or Focus more generally – and intonation, specifically the role of pitch accents for the interpretation of ambiguous Focus-particles like ‘at least’. The idea is that ‘at least’ can be epistemic or concessive, and we want to see whether there’s a correlation between the interpretation and the type of pitch accent the Focused constituent receives. We’ll be running both production and comprehension experiments that will hopefully lead to lots of interesting implications for linguistic and psycholinguistic theory.

UMass goes to BUCLD45!

The 45th Annual Boston University Child Language Development conference will take place virtually 11/6 to 11/8. The conference is FREE to student participants, and $60 for non-student participants: You can register here.

The full conference schedule is here. The conference will feature keynote presentations from Michael Frank and Adele Goldberg. In addition, a number of UMass students, alumni, professors and LARC members are presenting work there, including:

  • Children’s comprehension of two-level recursive possessives in Japanese and English. – D. Guerrero, T. Nakato, J. Park, T. Roepe
  • The distributional learning of recursive structures. D. Li, L. Grohe, P. Schulz, C. Yang
  • An acquisition path for Speech Acts in English and their interaction with negation. R. Woods, T. Roeper
  • Children’s sensitivity to prosody and ostension in answers to wh-questions. B. Stoddard, J. de Villiers
  • Exhaustive pairing errors in passives. J. Kisjes, B. Hollebrandse, A. van Hout
  • Iconic sentences are not always easier: Evidence from bilingual German-Greek children. C. Makrodimitris, P. Schulz
  • “Small big flowers” or “small and big flowers”? Simple is better and roll-up is too complex for Romanian 5-year-olds. A. C. Bleotu, T. Roeper

Breen colloquium Friday October 30 at 3:30

Mara Breen, Mount Holyoke, will present “Hierarchical linguistic metric structure in speaking, listening, and reading” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday October 30. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Register here: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUldemurz4oGdAo6hV69nh4k3y82zRiLVZB

Abstract
In this talk, I will describe results from experiments exploring how hierarchical timing regularities in language are realized by speakers, listeners, and readers. First, using a corpus of productions of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat—a highly metrically and phonologically regular children’s book, we show that speakers’ word durations and intensities are accurately predicted by models of linguistic and musical meter, respectively, demonstrating that listeners to these texts receive consistent acoustic cues to hierarchical metric structure. In a second experiment, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as participants listened to an aprosodic production of The Cat in the Hat. ERP results reveal separable electrophysiological indices of metric and phrasal processing, demonstrating top-down realization of metric structure even in the absence of explicit prosodic cues. In a third experiment, we recorded ERPs while participants silently read metrically regular rhyming couplets where the final word sometimes mismatched the metric or prosodic context. These mismatches elicited ERP patterns similar to responses observed in listening experiments. In sum, these results demonstrate similarities in perceived and simulated hierarchical timing processes in listening and reading and help explain the processes by which listeners use predictable metric structure to facilitate speech segmentation and comprehension.

Vasishth colloquium Friday September 25 at 3:30

Shravan Vasishth (vasishth.github.io), University of Potsdam, will present “Twenty years of retrieval models” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday September. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Register here:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUldemurz4oGdAo6hV69nh4k3y82zRiLVZB

Abstract

After Newell wrote his 1973 article, “You can’t play twenty questions with nature and win”, several important cognitive architectures emerged for modeling human cognitive processes across a wide range of phenomena. One of these, ACT-R, has played an important role in the study of memory processes in sentence processing.  In this talk, I will talk about some important lessons I have learnt over the last 20 years while trying to evaluate ACT-R based computational models of sentence comprehension. In this connection, I will present some new results from a recent set of sentence processing studies on Eastern Armenian.

Reference:
Shravan Vasishth and Felix Engelmann. Sentence comprehension as a cognitive process: A computational approach. 2021. Cambridge University Press. https://vasishth.github.io/RetrievalModels/

UMass linguists at ELM

The first ever Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference took place virtually from 9/16-9/18. Hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-organized by Florian Schwarz and Anna Papafragou, ELM is a ‘conference … dedicated to the experimental study of linguistic meaning broadly construed, with a focus on theoretical issues in semantics and pragmatics, their interplay with other components of the grammar, their relation to language processing and acquisition, as well as their connections to human cognition and computation.’ If you’d like to be kept in the loop about this conference and the growing community around it, please consider joining their mailing list.

The full schedule can be found here.

UMass students and alumni were well represented among the presenters, including:

Suzi Lima (Ph.D. 2014, currently University of Toronto) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘Defining atoms: a view from Brazilian languages‘

Maribel Romero (Ph.D., 1998, current University of Konstanz) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘OR NOT alternative questions, focus and discourse structure‘

and

Alexander Gobel, ‘The Common Ground is not enough: Why Focus-sensitivity matters for Presupposition triggers‘

Nadine Bade and Florian Schwarz, ‘New data on the nature of competition between indefinites and definites‘

Anissa Neal and Brian Dillon, ‘Definitely islands?‘

Carolyn Anderson, ‘Coming in, or going out? Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence‘

UMass linguists at SAFAL

The first South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and processing of Language (SAFAL-1) was held virtually at the University of Potsdam from 8/31 – 9/2. It was a satellite workshop to AMLaP 2020, and it was a workshop that ‘aims to provide a platform to exchange research on sentence processing, verbal semantics, computational modeling, corpus-based psycholinguistics, neurobiology of language, and child language acquisition, among others, in the context of the subcontinent’s linguistic landscape.’ Like AMLaP, it was free to attend: The schedule is here.

UMass linguists and psycholinguists were well represented among the speakers at the workshop, including…

Rajesh Bhatt gave a keynote talk on Wednesday 9/2 at 9:00AM Eastern time

Sakshi Bhatia and Brian Dillon gave a talk on Wednesday 9/2 entitled ‘Agreement processing in Hindi’ at 10:05 Eastern time.

Dustin Chacon, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon and Alec Marantz presented a poster entitled ‘The time course of Hindi agreement in the cognitive neuroscience of language’, on Wednesday 9/2.

Sudha Arunachalam, Sakshi Bhatia, and Kamal Choudhary lead a roundtable panel discussion to close the conference on Wednesday 9/2, at 11:45AM eastern time.

UMass Amherst Linguists at Virtual AMLaP 2020!

Potsdam University is hosting the 2020 Architectures and Mechanisms in Language Processing (AMLaP) conference virtually next week (registration is free!) and a number of UMass psycholinguists, past and present, are presenting! Although we’re very sad to not see our friends and colleagues in person in Berlin this year, the virtual format does mean that we can connect with our extended UMass family and hear about what they’re up to, even without traveling to Berlin.

AMLaP will take place September 3rd through 5th. The full schedule can be found here. Posters on September 3rd will be presented from 10- 11:30AM Pioneer Valley time, posters on September 4th will be presented from 8- 9:30AM Pioneer Valley time and posters on September 5th will presented from 4- 5:30 AM Pioneer Valley time.

Here’s the roll call of work by our UMass psycholinguist family at AMLaP… don’t miss it!

Yujing Huang and Fernanda Ferreira present their talk, Lingering misinterpretation of garden-path sentences and structural representation, on September 4th at 10AM – 10:30AM Pioneer Valley time.

Poster #163 (September 3rd): Degrees of reanalysis in pragmatically and syntactically motivated dependencies by Maayan Keshev and Aya Meltzer-Asscher

Poster #215 (September 3rd): Do Bare Noun Intervenors Attract Less? Evidence from Agreement Attraction in Romanian by Adina Camelia Bleotu and Brian Dillon

Poster #248 (September 3rd): Polarity Illusions are Quantifier Illusions by Wesley Orth, Masaya Yoshida, and Shayne Sloggett

Poster #276 (September 3rd): Thematic roles’ alignment with grammatical functions facilitates sentence processing by Michael Wilson and Brian Dillon

Poster #320 (September 3rd): Semantic commitment and lexical underspecification in the Maze by John Duff, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Amanda Rysling

Poster #87 (September 4th): The effect of morphological identity and voice mismatch in VP ellipsis by Jesse Harris and Adrian Brasoveanu

Poster #95 (September 5th): Missing-verb illusion in Turkish center-embeddings? An investigation of case interference and phrase lengths by Özge Bakay and Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz

Poster #162 (September 5th): Agreement attraction in reflexive pronouns depends on subject-verb agreement by Maayan Keshev and Aya Meltzer-Asscher

Poster #193 (September 5th): Investigating phonotactic illusions with an auditory lexical decision task by Bethany Dickerson

Poster #243 (September 5th): Active antecedent search triggered by cataphors persists past the subject: evidence from Norwegian and English by Anna Giskes and Dave Kush

Poster #288 (September 5th): Untangling neural responses to implicit phrasing and meter in children’s poetry by Ahren Fitzroy and Mara Breen

Poster #289 (September 5th): Scratching your tête over code switched idioms: Evidence from eye movement measures of reading by Marco S. G. Senaldi, Junyan Wei, Jason Gullifer and Debra Titone

Ivan defends August 17 at 10AM

Rodica Ivan will be defending her dissertation entitled ‘Talking about (her)self: Ambiguity Avoidance and Principle B, A Theoretical and Psycholinguistic Investigation of Romanian Pronouns’ on August 17th, at 10AM. In her thesis, Rodica explores the consequences that a close investigation of the Romanian pronominal system has for theories of binding and coreference, and investigates these issues psycholinguistically through a series of experiments on the comprehension and production of Romanian pronouns.

Please join us, virtually, to hear Rodica present her thesis! We ask that people register for this virtual Zoom defense in advance at the link below:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdOmgpjIiGdxk2BQUVtqqvTL_EP25BTRE

Cycle Linguists webchat launches

Mara Breen (Mt. Holyoke) and Brian Dillon (UMass Linguistics) are hosting the first ever Cycle Linguists web chat on 6/22. The Cycle Linguists is an occasional psycholinguistics oriented webchat in the Virtual CUNY style. The first webchat will feature Yujing Huang and Fernanda Ferreira, presenting a talk entitled “Lingering misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Incorrect syntactic representations or fallible memory processes?’ with after-talk discussion led by Maayan Keshev (Tel Aviv) and Patrick Sturt (Edinburgh). To register, click here: https://bit.ly/3cIeRZa , and for more announcements, follow @cyclinglings on Twitter!

This is an experimental webchat, but is hopefully the first in a series. Mara and Brian would be very happy for any local volunteers who would like to get involved in hosting or organizing the webchats! Please get in touch if you are interested.