Spring 2009 Calendar of Events

February 26
4:00 pm, CSE E220

The contributions of lexical bias, plausibility, and prosody to the resolution of temporary ambiguity in English sentences

Lecture Series on Written Language Comprehension

• Organized by: H. Wind Cowles, Department of Linguistics, Edith Kaan, Department of Linguistics, and Lori Altmann, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Susan Garnsey (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  The contributions of lexical bias, plausibility, and prosody to the resolution of temporary ambiguity in English sentences
• Sponsored by the Yavitz Fund.
• Workshop lectures free and open to the public.

Successful language comprehension requires the rapid combination and coordination of information and knowledge from a variety of sources. The human ability to understand language is especially impressive given the pervasiveness of ambiguity in the input.

People generally try to resolve ambiguity as quickly as possible using the information available to them when they encounter the ambiguity, rather than waiting for subsequent input to resolve it, even though subsequent input often does resolve ambiguities. If they initially choose what turns out to be the wrong resolution, they are said to have been 'garden-pathed'. For example, in a sentence beginning with "The referees warned the spectators",
there is temporary ambiguity about whether the spectators are the ones being warned. The sentence could continue with "about heckling the other team", in which case it is the spectators who are being warned, but it could instead continue with "would probably get too rowdy", in which case an unspecified someone else is being warned about the spectators.

There are many ways to measure the garden-pathing experience people have if their initial
interpretation of the role of spectators turns out to be inconsistent with the continuation of the sentence, including simple word-by-word self-paced reading times, eye movements during reading, and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) measured while people read or listen.

I will describe a series of studies using all of these techniques to investigate the contributions of various kinds of knowledge to the resolution of temporary ambiguity, including prior experience with how particular words in the sentence tend to be used, the plausibility of particular word combinations, and the prosody of spoken versions of the sentences. I will argue that multiple types of information interact to constrain the earliest interpretation of ambiguity, but that some kinds of information become available more rapidly than others and/or provide stronger constraint than others.

• Back to Calendar

Students | Faculty | Alumni | Last Updated 08/21/09 | Contact Webmaster | Site Map