Understanding Sentences PDF

Reminders! • Quiz 6 on Friday! Per poll results • Article Reflection 7 due Thursday at 10 am! • Grades for prior reflection will be posted this afternoon • Two articles for Wednesday’s special topic class! • Methods feedback has been returned! • No need for updates but know that you’ll be graded o...

Reminders! • Quiz 6 on Friday! Per poll results • Article Reflection 7 due Thursday at 10 am! • Grades for prior reflection will be posted this afternoon • Two articles for Wednesday’s special topic class! • Methods feedback has been returned! • No need for updates but know that you’ll be graded on study design Understanding Sentences Which sentences are ungrammatical? 1. The student the book. 2. Bought the book. 3. Bought the student the book. 4. The book was bought by the student. 5. By whom was the book bought? 6. By student the bought book. 7. The student was bought by the book. 8. Who bought the book? 9. The book bought the student. 10. The book bought. Ungrammatical 1, 2, 3, 6, 10 Important Distinction: Prescriptive Grammar vs. Descriptive Grammar Sentence comprehension is an active process! The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly an aa(n) kitekite/airplane in the park. in the park • DeLong et al. (2005) found larger N400 effects to airplane than kite • But they also found larger N400 effects to the article “an” than the article “a” • More recently, replication attempts have found N400 differences on the noun itself but not on the article (Nieuwland et al., 2018) • Other work using a visual world paradigm has found that participants will look to a relevant object before the conclusion of a sentence (Altman & Kamide, 1999; Kamide et al., 2003) The Dog Chased The Cat • Syntax: Rules for combining words into sentences • Parsing: Mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases • Determines meaning of the sentence! dog chased Sentences are not understood via linear ordering, but through parsing! cat Syntactic Ambiguity Importance of Parsing I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. Garden Path Sentences • Garden Path Sentence: Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but then end up meaning something else The horse raced past the barn fell. NP V PP ?? • Temporary Ambiguity! • Requires readers reanalysis [The horse raced past the barn] fell. NP V Constraint-Based Approach: Influence of Story Context There were two jockeys who decided to race their horses. One raced his horse along the path that went past the garden. The other raced his horse along the path that went past the barn. The horse raced past the barn fell. Constraint-Based Approach: Influence of Scene Context “Put the apple on the towel in the box” Tannenhaus & Trueswell (1995) Constraint-Based Approach: Influence of Scene Context “Put the apple on the towel in the box” Tannenhaus & Trueswell (1995) Tannenhaus & Trueswell (1995): Summary : Ambiguous Phrasing > Unambiguous Phrasing : Ambiguous Phrasing = Unambiguous Phrasing Results: When two apples are in the scene, “on the towel” is parsed as part of the noun phrase indicating which apple is to be moved Linguistic and nonlinguistic (scene) information are used simultaneously when parsing a sentence Reflection! • Explain what is meant by the statement “A sentence is not a chain but a tree.” What evidence do we have to support this?