Assignment 5

This assignment is about sentence comprehension and how people deal with ambiguous structures; ambiguities have been widely studied in psycholinguistics, because they are situations in which the listener/reader has to determine structural information that is clearly not present in the input. By seeing what people do in such situations, it is hoped that we will gain insight into how human language comprehension works.

Posted Thursday Nov. 13th, due Thursday Nov. 20th

The chapter by Garrett and the article by MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg both discuss the issue of how people use information about (i) semantics and discourse and (ii) structural frequencies in guiding their language comprehension. They are particularly interested in how this kind of non-syntactic information might guide people when they are faced with structural ambiguities like the following:

1a. The horse raced past the barn fell.
b. The pupil spotted by the proctor was expelled.

 

2a. The spy saw the cop with the binoculars.
b. The lifeguard saw the swimmer with inadequate experience.

As you will notice, Garrett and MacDonald et al. reach rather different conclusions about the relative importance of syntax, semantics, and frequency information in guiding how people parse sentences like (1-2).

• Explain their main point(s) of disagreement? Provide illustrative examples where at all relevant.
• What do you think are the best pieces of evidence for their views? [Take care to explain the relevant findings carefully, so as to be understandable to somebody who doesn't already know what you're saying!] Do they discuss findings which are in direct conflict with one another? [This is possible, since the MacDonald et al. paper was written a few years later than the Garrett article.]
• Which view, if either, do you find most compelling (based on the evidence given)? Are there things that you find dissatisfying in both papers?