Projects: Abstracts of final papers
Below you will find abstracts for the papers that were produced as final projects for the Spring 2003 Neurolinguistics Seminar.
Morphological Transparency and Reaction Times in Lexical Decision
Machteld van Rijsingen & Eytan Zweig
This paper explores the role of morphological transparency in the decomposition of words. It describes an experiment in which subjects performed lexical decision tasks on a list of seemingly morphologically complex words. It shows that words with opaque morphology (university) take longer to process than words that are monomorphemic (paint), pseudo-affixed (corner), or those that have transparent morphology (consumer). It also shows that the latter group are significantly slower than monomorphemic words. These results provide support for the hypothesis that all morphologically complex words decompose.
SEMANTICS:
Processing Correlates of Aspectual Classes
Oana Ciucivara & Laura Dorfman
This paper investigates how the processing of verbs is affected by their semantic complexity, or aspectual class. Three classes of verbs were compared in a lexical decision experiment: states, which are homogenous and lack complexity; activities, which are homogeneous but denote dynamic processes; and events (accomplishments and achievements), which denote complex eventualities. Gennari & Poeppel (2002, to appear) found that events elicit faster response times than states. The present study predicted that activities would elicit response times between those of states and events. The experiment did not replicate Gennari & Poeppel's result. In addition, activities were found to have shorter response times than both states and events, which was attributed to the syntactic ambiguity of the activities. This suggests that any effect of dynamicity is outweighed by syntactic ambiguity, and that further study is required on the effects of semantic complexity.
SENTENCE PROCESSING:
Use of Contextual Information in the Processing of Double Object Constructions
The self-paced moving window paradigm was used in an experiment examining the effect of plausibility biases in the parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The ambiguity rested on the verb’s ability to either take two NP objects (DOC) or and NP and a PP object. In one of the two conditions the first object NP biased the interpretation towards a DOC, whereas in the other condition it did not create any bias. This difference was found to have a significant effect in the processing of the DOC sentences, which supports models in which contextual information is used upon initial parsing.
