Alice Harris at the psycholinguistic group on Monday

Alice Harris will be presenting to the psycholinguistics group Monday April 25th at 6 pm in rm. 301 of South College. The title and abstract are below. All are welcome - pizza will be served at 6, and the talk will get underway shortly thereafter. The acquisition group will also be meeting that evening starting at 5:15, and the groups will merge over pizza. 

Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi:  Functional or Incidental?

Alice C. Harris (work done with Arthur Samuel)

The term “exuberant exponence” refers to the occurrence of more than two markers (exponents) of a feature or bundle of features within a single word, as in this example from Batsbi (Nakh-Daghestanian, severely endangered):  d-ex-d-o-d-anŏ  ‘evidently they are tearing down’, where each instance of d- realizes the gender and number of the object. While multiple exponence is seen in this example, some verbal lexemes in the language govern no gender-number marking at all, some one exponent, and some two. In a series of three experiments, we compare verbs that have no agreement marker with ones that have a single marker, and we compare verbs with one agreement marker with ones that have two.  We find that word recognition is slower with agreement than without it; words with two agreement markers are recognized more slowly and with more errors relative to verbs with a single marker.  For grammaticality judgments, subjects were generally slower to respond when the verb carried more markers.  For verbs with no marker versus verbs with one marker, this extra cognitive effort yielded improved accuracy; however, this advantage did not extend to multiple exponence, as the extra processing time did not produce much improvement in accuracy. In cued recall, the presence of one marker conferred a clear advantage in accuracy, but the presence of two agreement markers actually resulted in decreased accuracy.  Overall, multiple exponence was found not to confer a functional advantage.