The 25th Annual meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing was held March 14 through 16 at the CUNY Graduate Center. UMass showed up in force.
Lyn Frazier, an invited speaker, delivered a paper, entitled "Two Interpretive Systems for Natural Language," an abstract of which follows.
The desiderata for a theory of language interpretation include at least the following: explaining how humans compute the meaning of novel sentences, including implausible ones; characterizing the incrementality of interpretation; accounting for how interpretation processes relate to conscious awareness; explaining the existence and nature of widespread context effects, characterizing the complexity profile of interpretation (e.g., why DE contexts are more complex than non-DE contexts) and accounting for semantic illusions. The field of psycholinguistics is making successful forays into various aspects of interpretation, e.g., semantic ‘coercion,’ compositionality, scalar meanings, focus and the role of alternatives, implicatures, presupposition, counterfactual contexts, and the rapid impact of various types of stereotypical knowledge, to give only a few examples. I will argue that we also need to recognize the existence of two distinct systems for pairing form and meaning. One is the familiar type-based system that operates whether a sentence has an interpretation that describes a plausible real world situation or an implausible one. The other is token-based and involves the interpretation of repaired utterances, producing plausible meanings only; it depends on details of particular utterances as well as an implicit knowledge of the performance systems. Understanding the ‘performance pairing’ of form and meaning removes the need for the grammar to explain certain puzzling linguistic facts, and it helps to explain certain semantic illusions.
Alumnus Florian Schwarz presented, with Sonja Tiemann, "Presuppositions and projection in processing."
The poster session had many presentations by current and former UMass denizens. Posters from present members of the UMass linguistics community were:
"Ungrammatical interpretations of reflexive anaphors: Online or offline interfence? -- Brian Dillon
"PRO beats gap, revisited: Eyetracking evidence" -- Dan Petty, Mara Breen and Adrian Staub
"Eye-tracking Evidence for Implicit Prosodic Phrasing of Unambiguous Sentence" -- Mara Breen, Alexander Pollatsek and Adrian Staub
"Quantity judgments in Yudja (Tupi)" -- Suzi Lima
"Memory for words in sentences: The influence of word frequency and fixation time" -- Angela M. Pazzaglia, Adrian Staub, Caren Rotello and William Shattuck
"Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment" -- Mara Breen and Chuck Clifton
"Syntactic Probability Influences Duration" -- Claire Moore-Cantwell
And from the large diaspora of UMass alumni were the following:
"On the processing of epistemic modals" -- Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz and John Trueswell
"Neurolinguistic evidence for independent contributions of verb-specific and event-related knowledge to predictive processing" -- Michael Walsh Dickey and Tessa Warren
"Question structure and ellipsis" -- Christina Tim, Timothy Dozat and Jeff Runner
"Domain Restriction and Discourse Structure: Evidence from Processing" -- Florian Schwarz
"Quantifier Scope Ambiguity and the Timing of Algorithmic Processing" -- Veena Dwivedi
"Brain responses to negation: an fMRI study with Japanese negative polarity items" -- Masako Hirotani, Angela Friederici, Hiroki Tanabe, Koji Shimada, Mika Yamazaki-Murase and Norihiro Sadato
"The Collective Bias? Using eye movements to examine collective vs. distributive interpretations of plural sets" -- Christine Boylan, Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz and John Trueswell
Notable quote from the conference:
"Which conference is Janet's city really, really great to hold in? -- Chuck Clifton
