[lingtalks] Nayoung Kwon's dissertation defense- reminder

[Corie Gochicoa]

Hi All,

Nayoung Kwon's will defend her dissertation at 12:00PM, Friday May 16th,
in room 4301 AP&M.

Please see the attached poster.  The abstract is below.

Thank you,

Corie Gochicoa
Linguistics Advisor


Title: Processing of Long-Distance Syntactic and Referential Gap-Filler
Dependencies:
Evidence from reading time, ERP and eye-tracking data in Korean

This dissertation explores the processing of syntactic (1) and
referential gap-filler dependencies (2) in Korean relative and adjunct
clauses (‘because’ clauses), using event-related brain potentials
(ERPs), self-paced reading times, and eye-tracking.



(1)      [RC __ i  senator-acc attacked-rel] reporter-nom error-acc
admitted.

‘The reporter who attacked the senator admitted the error.



(2)      [because __ i  senator-acc attacked-because] reporter-nom
error-acc admitted.

‘Because hei attacked the senator, the reporteri admitted the error.’

I first discuss the processing of syntactic dependencies in the form of
Korean subject (SRs) and object relative clauses (ORs). The results show
a processing advantage of SRs over ORs, supporting processing models
based on the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan and Comrie 1977) and the
phrase-structural distance hypothesis (O’Grady 1997). Furthermore, the
ERP results show that at the head noun, where the gap and filler are
associated, ORs elicit a sustained left anterior negativity compared to
SRs, similar to the pattern found in English relatives. This effect is
attributed to higher working memory load for filler-gap association in ORs.

I next discuss the processing of backward anaphoric and syntactic
long-distance dependencies; here the goal is to investigate possible
similarities and differences in the underlying cognitive/neural
processes. The results show that the processing of anaphoric
dependencies is also sensitive to grammatical constraints defined in
terms of the accessibility hierarchy or hierarchical structural
distance. In the ERP experiment, both syntactic and anaphoric object
dependencies elicited a LAN effect in comparison to control sentences at
the matrix subject position. This is taken to suggest that in both types
of dependencies, gap-filler association is immediate. However, compared
to anaphoric dependencies, syntactic dependencies elicited a larger LAN
effect. At the next word, relative to syntactic dependencies, anaphoric
dependencies elicited a sustained LAN effect that continued through the
end of the clause. The different time-course of the (left) anterior
negativity was taken to suggest different gap-filler association
requirements for syntactic versus referential dependencies.


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