<div class="gmail_quote"><div>Hope to see you tomorrow! Once again, please note the time change -- the talks will start at 2pm.<br><br>----------------------------------------<br><br>Last week we heard how "two is not better than one", but this week we've set out to show that, sometimes, two *can* be even better than one, with a two-for-one presentation of CUNY-bound talks by Anna Holt and Lisa Rosenfelt! Come early for the happy
half-hour (with snacks and drinks) in CSB 215 at <b>2pm</b>. All are
welcome, so we hope to see you there! Please note that <b>we will be starting earlier</b> so as not to overlap with the memorial service for Kuroda (<a href="http://ling.ucsd.edu/kuroda/" target="_blank">http://ling.ucsd.edu/kuroda/</a>) that is starting at 4:30.<br>
<br><b>2:00-2:30 (CSB 215)</b><b>:</b> Happy half-hour<br><b>2:30-3:15 (CSB 280): </b>Anna Holt: "Resolving Conflicting Information from First-Mention Biases and Discourse Event Structure in Ambiguous Pronoun Interpretation in a Short Story Paradigm"<br>
<b>3:15</b><b>-4:00 (CSB 280): </b>Lisa Rosenfelt: "No ERP evidence for automatic first-pass parsing: Pure word category violations do not elicit early negativity"<div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div>
<div>
<div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="EN-US">
<div>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span><b>*********************************************<br>CRL Happy Half Hour @ 2:00 in CSB 215<br>CRL Talks @ 2:30 in CSB 280<br>
*********************************************</b></p><font size="4"><b>Resolving Conflicting Information from First-Mention Biases and Discourse Event Structure in Ambiguous Pronoun Interpretation in a Short Story Paradigm<br>
(Anna Holt and Gedeon Deak)</b></font><br><br>Making anaphoric judgments in a discourse context holds several novel challenges when compared with simple, intra-sentential anaphoric resolution. Adults use the lexical features of a pronoun (e.g. gender, animacy, and number) as the most reliable source of information for disambiguation. However, when lexical features of a pronoun are underspecified, adults use conflicting strategies with which to determine the referent of a pronoun. Adults have a well-known preference for considering the first out of two or more entities in a sentence—often the grammatical subject and the continuing discourse topic-- as the most salient one (preferred pronoun referent) (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000). However, recent work (Rohde, Kehler and Elman, 2007) suggest adults also use strategies which take into account event structure and discourse cohesion when determining the referent of a pronoun in an inter-sentential story completion paradigm. For instance, participants prefer interpretations consistent with ongoing action (e.g. adults spontaneously produce more goal continuations for pronouns following sentences with a perfective verb than an imperfective verb.) We tested how adults resolve conflicting cues to inter-sentential pronoun interpretation, including the first mentioned entity, the most frequently named entity, and the entity predicted by verb aspect and verb semantics. We created a set of five sentence short stories which involve two actors. The two actors participate in a short exchange using a transfer of motion verb. An ambiguous pronoun undergoes an intransitive action, and participants are asked to choose which actor is the referent of the pronoun. Throughout these stories, we vary 1) whether or not the current topic is also the initial subject of the first sentence (presence or absence of a topic switch) 2) whether or not the last-mentioned actor is also the initial subject of the first sentence and finally 3) whether the event structure predicted by the intransitive verb suggests a goal continuation from the actor in the transfer-of-motion sentence or a source continuation. We collected responses as the reaction time to choose the appropriate actor following story presentation and the percentage of choices of initial story topic. Future work will additionally collect eye-tracking data, as pronoun resolution in unambiguous situations is typically resolved with 200ms (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000).<br>
<br>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br><font size="4"><b>No ERP evidence for automatic first-pass parsing: Pure word category violations do not elicit early negativity<br>
(Lisa Rosenfelt, Christopher Barkley, Kimberly K. Belvin, Chia-lin Lee, Kara Federmeier, Robert Kluender, and Marta Kutas)<br></b></font><br>Certain neurocognitive processing models [1,2] map early left anterior negativity (eLAN) onto automatic first-stage parsing—because it is elicited by purported grammatical category violations, by hypothesis interfering with initial syntactic assignments—and late positivity (P600) onto processes of reanalysis occurring later in time. Crucially, however, eLAN (followed by a P600) has been reliably elicited only by words following missing nominal heads, as in Max's __ OF [3] and im __ BESUCHT (“visited in the __”) [4]. In the latter, most common paradigm, the violation occurs when a verb replaces the expected noun. Thus noun/verb violations that do not elicit early negativity [5,6] and grammatical verb gapping that does [7,8] become relevant to the discussion.<br>
<br>We compared ERP responses to word category violations with (a,b: “ungapped”) and without (c: “gapped”) phrasal heads in stories that required reading for comprehension rather than monitoring for syntactic well-formedness. <br>
<br>[...]<br><br>In sum, violation of the expected grammatical category of an incoming word is not a sufficient (i) [5,6] condition for eliciting early negativity; it seems to be reliably elicited only in paradigms that gap phrasal heads (ii) [3,4,7,8,9]. If early negativity is sensitive to gapping rather than to grammatical category per se, it cannot be the index of an automatic first-pass parse assigning preliminary syntactic structure. Without a reliable ERP index of modular first-pass parsing, a crucial piece of neurocognitive evidence in support of serial parsing models is called into question. <br>
<br><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div><br>