Breen at Cognitive Brown Bag Weds. 2/4 at noon

Mara Breen of Mt. Holyoke College will be presenting Rhythmic context affects syntactic ambiguity resolution in listening and reading in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521 at noon Wednesday. Everyone is welcome – the abstract is below.

Abstract: In this talk I will describe three experiments demonstrating that rhythmic context influences both listeners’ and readers’ syntactic parsing decisions. In Experiment One, listeners provided written continuations of auditorily-presented ambiguous sentence fragments (e.g., Children know the cruel insult?) which ended with a syntactically ambiguous stress-alternating noun-verb homograph (e.g., insult; INsult = noun, inSULT = verb). The prosody of these fragments was manipulated to bias listeners to perceive the rhythmic pattern of either the noun or the verb. Listeners provided continuations which were consistent with the rhythmic pattern of the fragment. In Experiment Two, readers provided written continuations of similar fragments, though now they were presented visually, and the penultimate word was either one or two syllables (e.g., cruel or heartless), providing an implicit version of the rhythmic manipulation from Experiment One (e.g., The CRUEL inSULT; The HEARTless INsult). Readers demonstrated sensitivity to the rhythmic context, providing more verb-consistent continuations of sentences with a one-syllable penultimate word than those with a disyllabic penultimate word. In Experiment Three, a new set of participants’ eyes were tracked as they read sentences which were like those in Experiment Two, but which were disambiguated as nouns or verbs (e.g., It’s that the cruel/heartless insult (is not going to hurt them / the people who are not threatening). Eye-tracking results indicated that, although readers were garden-pathed by the verb-consistent continuation, reanalysis was easier with the one-syllable adj/noun than the two syllable adj/noun, demonstrating that readers generate implicit rhythmic patterns during silent reading which can serve to influence real-time interpretation of ambiguous sentence material.