Slogget at Santa Cruz

Shayne Slogget will give a talk at the University of California at Santa Cruz this Wednesday, June 1. The title of his talk is “Do comprehenders violate Binding Theory? Depends on your point of view."

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Angelika Kratzer writes:

You (and your friends, students, colleagues) are all invited to a symposium on:

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Saturday, April 16 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Integrative Learning Center, N 400 

Please spread the word! Catered reception starting at 1:00 PM. This might or might not be a substitute for lunch. 

9:30

Coffee, settling down

10:00  - 10:55

Kate Davidson, Linguistics Department, Harvard University 

Our cat went "meow" and my dog was like "feed me!": iconic attitude reports in spoken and sign languages.

Hadas Kotek, Linguistics Department, McGill University Chair & last question or comment. 

11:05 - 12:00

Jonathan Phillips, Moral Cognition Lab, Psychology Department, Harvard University

Factive Theory of Mind

Angelika Kratzer, Department of Linguistics, UMass AmherstChair & last question or comment. 

12:10 - 1:05

Shevaun Lewis, Language & Cognition Lab, Cognitive Science Department, Johns Hopkins University

The Role of Pragmatics in Language Development and Processing

Amy Rose Deal, Linguistics Department, UC BerkeleyChair & last question or comment. 


The Symposium is offered and organized by members of the 2015/2016 SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) Summer Institute. Financial support for the symposium comes from Research and Professional Development Funds provided by UMass Amherst, which are gratefully acknowledged.  More information about the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute: 

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sias/

Dillon at Northwestern

Brian Dillon gave a colloquium talk at Northwestern University on Friday, April 8. A title and abstract follow.

Grammatical illusions in sentence processing: At the interface of performance and competence

One question of interest for psycholinguists is the question of how closely real-time sentence processing routines align with grammatical knowledge: does the competence grammar directly constrain sentence comprehension, or does it play a secondary role, 'cleaning up' the results of a comprehension process driven by heuristic processes (e.g. Lewis & Phillips, 2015; Patson & Ferreira, 2007; Townsend & Bever, 2001)? Much experimental work has provided evidence for the view that the human sentence processor is fairly directly constrained by grammatical knowledge even at the earliest stages of analysis, suggesting a very tight link between grammatical knowledge and the sentence processor. However, a puzzle for this view is the observation that there are many apparently simple grammatical constraints, such as subject-verb agreement, that comprehenders seem unable to accurately apply during comprehension (e.g. Wagers, Lau & Phillips, 2009). Such 'grammatical illusions' have been accounted for by appealing to independently motivated aspects of the parser, such as an interference-prone working memory architecture (Phillips, Lau & Wagers, 2011; see also Frazier, 2015).

Research on grammatical illusions has generated a wealth of psycholinguistic data that bears on when, and how, grammatical constraints guide the analysis of linguistic input. Overall the data reveal a pattern of 'selective fallibility': some linguistic dependencies fall prey to grammatical illusions quite readily, others do not (Phillips et al, 2011). This leads to an important theoretical question which is the focus of my talk: when, and why, do comprehenders violate grammatical constraints during sentence comprehension? In this talk, I will review some of the work in this area, and discuss processing models that have been proposed to account for these processor-grammar divergences. I will then discuss two case studies from our group at UMass Amherst on the processing of reflexive binding dependencies (work with Shayne Sloggett) and the licensing of negative polarity items in comprehension (work with Jon Ander Mendia and Ethan Poole) that provide new insight into the factors that create grammatical illusions in comprehension. These studies suggest that some grammatical illusions actually have grammatical bases, reflecting 'subgrammatical' linguistic constraints. This study suggests that grammaticality illusions are no mere performance errors; instead, they are regular and predictable behavior that provides a unique window into normal grammatical mechanisms and normal processing mechanisms alike.

Dillon at MIT tomorrow

Brian Dillon will give a talk at MIT tomorrow, Monday March 28, at 1PM. The title of his talk is “Which noun phrases is this verb supposed to agree with... and when?” The abstract follows.

The study of agreement constraints has yielded much insight into the organization of grammatical knowledge, within and across languages. In a parallel fashion, the study of agreement production and comprehension have provided key data in the development of theories of language production and comprehension. In this talk I present work at the intersection of these two research traditions. I present the results of experimental research (joint work with Adrian Staub, Charles Clifton Jr, and Josh Levy) that suggests that the grammar of many American English speakers is variable: in certain syntactic configurations, more than one NP is permitted to control agreement (Kimball & Aissen, 1971). However, our work suggests that this variability is not random, and in particular, optional agreement processes are constrained by the nature of the parser. We propose that variable agreement choices arise in part as a function of how the parser stores syntactic material in working memory d uring the incremental production of syntactic structures.

Bernhard Angele at Cognitive Brown Bag

Bernhard Angele of Bournemouth University (UK) will give the Brown Bag presentation on Wednesday March 23 from 12-1:20 in Tobin 521B. A title and abstract of his talk follows.

Title:

They’re onto us! The phenomenon of participants detecting display changes and what it can tell us about the reading process

Abstract:

In the boundary change paradigm (Rayner, 1975), when a reader's eyes cross an invisible boundary location, a preview word is replaced by a target word. Readers are generally unaware of such changes due to saccadic suppression. However, some readers detect changes on a few trials and a small percentage of them detect many changes. I will present three experiments which combined eye movement data with signal detection analyses to investigate display change detection. On each trial, readers had to indicate if they saw a display change in addition to reading for meaning. On half the trials the display change occurred during the saccade (immediate condition); on the other half, it was slowed by 15–25 ms (delay condition) to increase the likelihood that achange would be detected; we also manipulated the properties of the parafoveal preview word. Using this new paradigm, we found that subjects were (1) highly sensitive to display change delays, and (2) more sensitive to display changes which involved a change of letter identity (e.g. jNxVa to gReEn) than to display changes which involved a change of visual features, but kept letter identity constant (e.g. gReEn to GrEeN). Finally, (3) subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a non-wordlike preview (xbtchp to garden) than when the change was from a wordlike preview (puvtur to garden), but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or non-wordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of pre-boundary wordfrequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, pre-attentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage.

Dillon, Staub, Levy and Clifton in Language

Dillon, Staub, Levy and Clifton's paper, "Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with? Object agreement in American English", has been accepted for publication in Language. 

29th CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics

The University of Florida Gainesville is hosting the Twenty Ninth meeting of the CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics March 3-5. UMass is represented by:

Lap-Ching Keung and Adrian Staub who are presenting the paper “Closest conjunct agreement in English: A comparison with number attraction."

Alumna Katy Carlson, with Benjamin Lee, Sarah Nelson and Blake Clark, is presenting the poster “Comparative ellipsis has an object bias, though subjects are more frequent."

Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Computation of Agreement is Verb-Centric Regardless of Word Order."

Alumni Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson are presenting the poster “Correlate not optional: PP sprouting in ‘much less’ ellipsis."

Alumnus Greg Carlson, with Thais M. M. de Sa, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima and Micheal Tanenhause present the poster “Experimental evidence that “weak definite” noun phrases are not interpreted as generics"

Jérémy Pasquereau and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Grammaticality illusions are conditioned by lexical item-specific grammatical properties."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Sonia Michniewicz and Jessica Rett present the poster “Incremental interpretation in cases of individual/degree polysemy"

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Alyssa Ibarra, present the poster “Informational focus in Spanish pronoun resolution: answering the QUD"

Brian Dillon, with Akira Omaki and Zoe Ovans, present the poster “Intrusive reflexive binding inside a fronted wh-predicate."

Brian Dillon, Nicolleta Biondo and Francesco Vespignani present the poster “Structural Constraints strongly determine the attachment of termporal adverbs."

Adrian Staub, with Francesca Foppolo, Carlo Cecchetto, Caterina Donati and Vincenzo Moscati present the poster “Minding the gap: The parser avoids relative clause analyses whenever it can."

Alumnus Paul de Lacy, with Karin Stromswold and Gwendolyn Rehrig present the poster “Passive sentences can be predicted by adults."

Shayne Sloggett and Brian Dillon present the poster “Person blocking effects in the processing of English reflexives."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Kelly-Ann Blake and Frederick Gietz present the poster “Prediction and inhibition of syntactic structure: Evidence from either (of the)… or."

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Yahang Xu, presents the poster “Reflexive Retrieval in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the local search hypothesis."

Alumnus Michael Terry and alumna Masako Hirotani, with Erik Thomas and Sandra Jackson present the poster “The processing of third person singular -s by African American English speaking second graders: an auditory ERP study."

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Kyeong-min Kim and Chung-hye Han, present the poster “The syntax of null objects: evidence from inter-speaker variation."

For more information, go here.

Dillon in D.C.

Brian Dillon gave a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland on Friday, December 11. The title of his talk was "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives." An abstract follows.

One question of enduring interest for psycholinguists is the question of how closely real-time sentence processing routines align with grammatical knowledge: does the competence grammar directly constrain sentence comprehension, or does it play a secondary role, 'cleaning up' the results of a comprehension process driven by heuristics (Lewis & Phillips, 2015; Patson & Ferreira, 2007; Townsend & Bever, 2001)? Much experimental work has provided evidence for the view that the human sentence processor is directly constrained by grammatical knowledge. A challenge for this view is the observation that there are a number of apparently simple grammatical constraints that comprehenders fail to respect in comprehension, such as subject-verb agreement (e.g. Wagers, Lau & Phillips, 2009). Providing an explanation of why we see these 'grammaticality illusions,' and why only certain dependencies seem to be be susceptible to illusory grammaticality, has been a productive research project that has led to new and diverse models of linguistic dependency formation in real-time comprehension (Phillips, Wagers & Lau, 2011). In this talk, I will review this work, and present two case studies from the research group at UMass that provide some new perspectives, and new puzzles, for this project. In the first part of the talk, I will present evidence from English reflexive processing (joint work with Shayne Sloggett) that suggests that grammaticality illusion associated with English reflexives are created by assigning a logophoric interpretation to the reflexive form. In the second part, I present work with Jérémy Pasquereau on a novel grammatical illusion, French quantifier/de-phrase dependencies. This work suggests that not all intrusive licensors are created equal, and that only some quantifiers have the potential to create grammaticality illusion effects in French. Taken together, these studies suggest that grammatical illusions are conditioned by the availability of alternative structures and interpretations made available by the grammar. In a slogan, it appears that what could've been said, but wasn't, seems to play a role in creating grammaticality illusion effects in comprehension.

Jesse Harris at UMass

Amanda Rysling writes:

Next week on Monday, November 30th, UMass alumnus Jesse Harris (PhD linguistics '12) will present some of his recent work in the linguistics labs meeting. If you’re planning on coming, and don’t usually attend lab meeting, please let me know (arysling@linguist.umass.edu) so we can ensure there are enough snacks.

We'll meet at the usual time, 4 to 5:30, but in an unusual place: ILC N400. 

Jon Sprouse gives department colloq

Jon Sprouse (UConn) will give the department colloquium at 3:30 on Friday, December 4, in ILC 400. A title and abstract will be posted here when they become available.

Dillon in print

Brian Dillon, Wing-Yee Chow and Ming Xiang's paper, "The relationship between anaphor features and antecedent retrieval: Comparing Mandarin ziji and ta-ziji," has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology. 

Psycholinguistics job in Genoa

RESEARCH POSITION IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS – EXPERIMENTAL PRAGMATICS
Project: EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions
Place: Genoa (Italy)
Department: DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences, Psychology Unit
Principal Investigator: Dr. Filippo Domaneschi
E-mail: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it
Phone: +39 010 20953710


N. 1 –  2-years contract (1 year contract renewable 1 year).

Title: Psycholinguistic analysis of the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions

Short Title: Presuppositions and Cognitive Processes

Description: Applications are now being accepted for a 2-years (1+1) full-time research position in psycholinguistics with specialization in experimental semantics/pragmatics.

The successful candidate will become member of the DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences – Psychology Unit, University of Genoa (Italy) and will join Dr. Filippo Domaneschi’s SIR project “EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions” financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project investigates by psycholinguistic experimental methods the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions with a particular focus on the cognitive load required to process the information communicated as taken for granted.

This position is 100% research and involves no teaching obligations. Responsibilities of the researcher will include: lab activities, contributing original research avenues, and presenting and publishing results. 
The planned start date is the beginning of February, and the project will run for 2 years (1 year renewable 1 year).

Required skills: 
(i)Solid training in linguistic semantics and pragmatics.(ii)Experience in psycholinguistic experimental work.(iii)Programming skills with Lab software (e.g. E-Prime, Presentation, Psychopy).(iv)Statistical skills (e.g. SPSS, R).

For Italian candidates – further details about the submission can be found at:
https://unige.it/concorsi/assricerca/

For foreign candidates – info about the submission procedure will be provided directly by Dr. Filippo Domaneschi at: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

Deadline: 17.12.2015
Info: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

Tom and Jeremy at Jackson Street School

Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper will make a presentation at “Science Night" at the Jackson Street School on November 19th. There talk will be on acquisition and psycholinguistics.

Dillon in Connecticut

Brian Dillon gives a colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut on Friday, November 6, entitled  "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives."

Language. Cognition and Neuroscience issue on "Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics"

The special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on “Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics,” edited by our own Alice Harris with Elisabeth Nordcliffe and Florian Jaeger has appeared. The issue has thirteen papers on language production and comprehension with a focus on understudied languages. You can learn more here.

Matt Wagers spoke on Wednesday

Matt Wagers (UCSC) gave an impromptu talk at the Psycholinguistics Workshop last Tuesday, Oct. 6. The title of his talk was “I see nothing! Processing phonetically-null DPs in a verb-initial language."

Gerry Altman at Cognitive Brown Bag

Gerry Altmann of UConn Psychology will be giving the Cognitive Brown Bag on Wednesday, 10/7, at 12:00 in Tobin 521B.  The abstract for the untitled talk is:

Language is often used to describe the changes that occur around us – changes in either state (“I cracked the glass…”) or location (“I moved the glass onto the table…”). To fully comprehend such events requires that we represent the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of any object that undergoes change. But how do we represent these mutually exclusive states of a single object at the same time? I shall summarize a series of studies, primarily from fMRI, which show that we do represent such alternative states, and that these alternative states compete with one another in much the same way as alternative interpretations of an ambiguous word might compete. This interference, or competition, manifests in a part of the brain that has been implicated in resolving competition. Furthermore, activity in this area is predicted by the dissimilarity, elsewhere in the brain, between sensorimotor instantiations of the described object’s distinct states. I shall end with the beginnings of a new account of event representation which does away with the traditional distinctions between actions, participants, time, and space. [Prior knowledge of the brain is neither presumed, required, nor advantageous!].

Call for papers: Non-Finite Subjects

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING) is pleased to announce the NonFinite Subjects Conference, to be held at the University of Nantes, Nantes (France) on April 1-2, 2016. The conference aims at providing a forum for discussion of recent, high quality research on the subject position of non-finite structures.

INVITED SPEAKERS:
Misha Becker, University of North Carolina 
Hazel Pearson, ZAS Berlin
Michelle Sheehan, University of Cambridge
Sandhya Sundaresan, University of Leipzig

IMPORTANT DATES: 
Deadline for submissions: December 11, 2015
Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2016
Conference dates: April 1-2, 2016

MEETING DESCRIPTION
This workshop focuses on recent findings that shake the standard assumptions on the syntax and semantics of the subject position of non-finite structures. By scrutinizing data that does not quite fit standard approaches to non-finite subjects, we seek to question the premises and basic tenets underlying standard approaches in order to develop more explanatory analyses of the distribution and interpretation of non-finite subjects.

We invite submission of abstracts on the syntactic, semantic and psycholinguistic aspects of this topic, with potential questions that include, but are not restricted to the following issues:

Lexical subjects freely alternating with PRO.
The classical approach assumes a strict correlation between finiteness and types of subjects: finite constructions display lexical subjects, while non-finite ones only allow PRO (here used pretheoretically) or NP-traces. However, a multiplicity of data contradicts this generalization. 

In many languages lexical DPs alternate with PRO in non-finite structures (see in particular Sundaresan & McFadden 2009), including English gerunds (Reuland 1983, Pires 2007), personal infinitive constructions in Romance (Elordieta 1992, Mensching 2000, Herbeck 2011), and raising structures across a variety of languages (Szabolcsi 2009). 

Structures that are apparently finite allow PRO-like non-overt subjects in alternation with lexical subjects in languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, a phenomenon dubbed 'finite control' (for discussion cf. Rodrigues 2004, Ferreira 2007, Holmberg et al. 2009, Modesto 2011).
What are the theoretical consequences of this non-complementary distribution? Should the PRO vs. lexical subject dichotomy be abandoned?

The standard approach relied on Case theory (Chomsky 1981). But given the aforementioned facts, can Case still be said to play a role with respect to the realizational properties of subjects (cf. Sigurðsson 1991, 2008, Landau 2006, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009)?

'Overt PRO'.
Languages such as Hungarian, Korean, Italian or Portuguese allow overt pronouns with the properties of Obligatory Control PRO (Borer 1989, Szabolcsi 2009, Barbosa 2009). How does the existence of 'overt PROs' fit in current approaches to non-finiteness (and in particular to control/raising)? Should we conclude that the silent nature of PRO is nothing more than a circumstantial fact (cf. Livitz 2013, Sundaresan 2014, Herbeck 2015)? Furthermore, 'overt PROs' appear to be limited to pro-drop languages (Barbosa 2009). Is this a causal correlation? 

Overt PROs are pronouns in many languages, but have reflexive or anaphor-like properties in languages such as Korean (Borer 1989, Lee 2009). Can a unified explanation be given of this cross-linguistic variation?

Beyond infinitives: Degrees of (non-)finiteness and subjects.
From a cross-linguistic perspective, the finiteness vs. non-finiteness dichotomy is intricate. Besides infinitives, languages display other non-inflected structures, such as gerundive constructions, or nominalizations whose subject positions can have properties that contrast with those of infinitives (cf. Pires 2007). Moreover, certain subjunctives, in particular in languages that lack non-inflected constructions, such as Greek and other Balkan languages, have been shown to display OC properties, while in other languages (e.g. Romance languages) the subject of subjunctives is typically obviative (cf. Szabolcsi 2010). A further relevant topic is that of inflected infinitives and the variety of subjects they allow (cf. Sheehan 2013, 2014). How can this range of phenomena be accounted for? How do we correlate the typology of (non-)finiteness and the distribution/interpretation of subjects and what theoretical implications should we draw? 

From a more general perspective on clausal structure, assuming a whole spectrum of non-finiteness (Haddican & Tsoulas 2012, Wurmbrand 2014), is there a corresponding array of subjects and how do the precise features of this continuum interact with the typology of subjects? Are the properties of the C-layer relevant in this regard (Rizzi 1997, Adger 2007)? What about tense and/or agreement (Wurmbrand 2001, 2014, Landau 2004)?

Interpretation of finite vs. non-finite subjects.
Beyond forcing the subject to be non-overt, a further tenet of the standard approach is that non-finiteness also forces the subject to be anaphoric/referentially dependent. To what extent does this correlation hold since, as noted above, in many languages referentially free expressions (overt or null) also occur in nonfinite constructions.  How can these differences be accounted for? 

Should we abandon the idea that (non-)finiteness and referential dependence are causally related? In which case, should we still maintain the hypothesis that the silence of PRO-like expressions is related to their anaphoric nature (cf. Livitz 2013)? Is a notion of 'syntactic dependence' (cf. Sundaresan 2012) relevant for characterizing the types of subjects found in non-finite constructions ? Ultimately, should we consider (at least) PRO and pro to be two facets of a single phenomenon (cf. Herbeck 2015; see also Sundaresan 2014)?

Selection.
There is also the issue of the relation with the higher finite structure. Are the properties of non-finite subjects determined by the matrix verb that selects the non-finite construction (Borer 1989, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009, Pearson 2013, Grano 2015)? What then determines the nature of subjects of e.g. non-finite clauses in adjunct position or subject position?

Experimental evidence.
How do children acquire the intricate patterns of finiteness and the corresponding subject properties? Are the different constructions discussed above processed differently?
More generally, what experimental or psycholinguistic evidence can be brought to bear on the issues discussed above?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Abstracts should not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples, tables, figures and references, with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title and should not reveal the name of the author(s). The abstracts must be uploaded as PDF attachments to the EasyChair site. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author. 

CONFERENCE WEBSITE:
https://sites.google.com/site/nonfinitesubjects/

CONTACT
nonfinitesubjects@gmail.com 

Chuck Clifton speaks on Wednesday

Chuck Clifton (Psychology) will give the first cognitive brown bag talk this semester on Wednesday, September 16, at noon in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.

How readers and listeners use their knowledge of grammar - and how they go beyond it

The realization that our ability to produce and comprehend language requires use of detailed and elaborate knowledge of syntax fueled the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. Over the following 20 years, we learned a great deal about how readers and listeners used this knowledge in real time to interpret sentences. The success of these analyses of how language comprehension was driven by grammatical knowledge led to competing analyses, emphasizing how various sources of extra-grammatical knowledge contribute to language comprehension. In the years since the peak of the debate between these contrasting positions, more nuanced approaches have developed. These approaches extend the analysis of grammar's contributions to incorporate effects of prosody, semantics, and pragmatics, and recognize that different types of grammatical relations might be processed differently. Other recent approaches have gone beyond grammar to consider the role language statistics might play in comprehension. Currently, my colleagues and I are exploring how language users employ their knowledge of what speakers and writers are likely to intend, and what kinds of errors they are likely to make in producing language, to arrive at interpretations of sentences that violate the grammatical requirements of the language.

In the first part of this talk, I will summarize the changing views of how we comprehend what we read and hear, providing illustrations of theoretical claims and examples of experimental evidence. In the second part of the talk, I will describe some of the work my colleagues and I are currently doing on what we call "acceptable ungrammaticality," in which readers' and listeners' interpretations of language are guided by what they know of how writers and speakers can misuse the grammar of their language.

Psycholinguistic Workshop

Amanda Rysling writes:

The Psycholinguistics Workshop this semester will meet on Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 in N400.
There are also going to be some talks or events not at that time, which will be announced on the ling-psych mailing list. Anyone who wants to present something, whether at a daytime meeting or during a special evening/reading group session, should let me know.