[lingtalks] Monday: Roger Levy (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Eric Bakovic]

On Monday 12 October at 2pm, Roger Levy (UC San Diego; http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rlevy/ 
  ) will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M  
4301.

:: Abstract ::

The Processing of Extraposed Structures in English

Roger Levy
UC San Diego
In most languages, most of the word-word dependency relations found in  
any given sentence are projective: they do not cross other word-word  
dependencies in the sentence. Some dependencies, however, are non-  
projective, crossing other dependencies in the sentence. Crossing  
dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than  
projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to  
investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to  
crossing dependencies, and whether factors known to influence  
processing of conventional dependencies also affect crossing-  
dependency processing. We report four self-paced reading studies,  
together with corpus studies, investigating the comprehension  
difficulty associated with the crossing dependencies created by the  
extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that  
extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates  
comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with  
probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora.  
Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given  
noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even  
reverse the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments  
rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or  
dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. This is the first  
demonstration that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic  
expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and  
suggests that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of  
comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely  
through probabilistic expectations.



==

Please visit our colloquium webpage for more information about  
upcoming colloquia (as they are confirmed):
	http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia/