[lingtalks] Rachel Sussman's Talk at U.C.S.D

[Catherine Alioto]

U.C.S.D presents a talk by Rachel Sussman, University Wisconsin-Madison
Monday, February 12, 2007
2:00 - 4:00 pm
Applied Physics and Mathematics Building
Multimedia Room # 4301

>TITLE: The role of instrument information during on-line sentence
>processing: What psycholinguistic data tells us about verb
>representation
>
>ABSTRACT: A growing body of work supports the rapid influence of
>complex verb information during both spoken and written comprehension.
>However, the full extent and nature of the information provided by the
>verb is still being explored.
>
>In this talk, I present evidence that verbs provide immediate access
>to information about instruments associated with their actions during
>online processing of spoken language.  In a visual-world eye-tracking
>task, participant's eye movements were monitored as they followed
>spoken instructions such as Poke/Touch the dolphin in displays that
>contained a potential instrument (e.g. a pencil).  For
>instrument-biased verbs, participants used an instrument on most
>trials and, most importantly, began to look at the instrument before
>hearing the noun.   Instrument verbs were also more effective at
>focusing participants' attention on instrument-compatible items in the
>display (e.g., a potato for an instruction beginning peel the) than
>non instrument-compatible objects (e.g., a banana).
>
>These results bear on questions relating to the lexical representation
>of verbs.  In particular, since instruments are not part of the verb's
>syntactic argument structure, the result demonstrates that activated
>participant roles need not be linked to the syntactic argument
>structure of the verb; instead, the activated lexical representations
>of verbs may rather reflect the particular action situations with
>which the verb has become strongly associated.



Catherine Alioto
Assistant to the Chair
Academic Affairs Coordinator
University of California, San Diego
Department of Linguistics
AP&M Building
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0108
(858) 534-3601

Catherine Alioto
Assistant to the Chair
Academic Affairs Coordinator
University of California, San Diego
Department of Linguistics
McGill Hall
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0108
(858) 534-3601
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