[lingtalks] Monday: Roger Levy (Linguistics Colloquium)
Eric Bakovic
bakovic at ling.ucsd.edu
Tue Oct 6 18:55:38 PDT 2009
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/
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