Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Abstract
Method
Judgment Results
Introduction
Sequences such as The prisoner taught .: are
ambiguous between
o taught is the main verb and prisoner is its subject
o taught is a passive participle in a relative clause and
prisoner is its object
Continuations such as by the guard tried to escape
establish that the second structure is correct, and they
increase processing time.
Event structure may predict garden path difficulty
(OBryan, 2003)
o Telic verbs denote an inherent endpoint and a change in
state
o Atelic verbs denote a homogenous situation and no
change in state
Progressive Entailment
If the man was building a house, did he definitely build the
house? No
If the boy was pushing a cart, did the boy definitely push the
cart? Yes
If a verb in the progressive form
o does not entail that the event occurred, it is telic
o does entail that the event occurred, it is atelic
The Endpoint Hypothesis (EH): when the parser
recognizes a telic verb it seeks an entity that could
undergo a change of state to mark the endpoint of the
event.
Causative Alternation
If the instructor halted the student, did the student halt? Yes
If the instructor taught the student, did the student teach? No
If the subject of an intransitive verb can appear as a
transitive object, the verb is telic; otherwise it is atelic
(Olsen,1998; Schafer, 2009)
The Patient Role Hypothesis (PRH): when the parser
recognizes a telic verb that undergoes causative
alternation, it assigns the patient role to the initial noun
To what extent do the properties of progressive entailment
and causative alternation predict a garden path?
Judgment Study
Covariate Results
Covariate Analysis
Reduced Relative Effect (RRE): fixation time for RC minus
fixation time for UC
Tests on RRE with no covariate and with PE and CA as
covariates
Variances and regression slopes did not differ, all ps > .10
Previous Studies
Structure Type
Reading time was longer for reduced clauses in first pass
time (513 vs. 473), F1 (1, 83) = 13.0, p = .01, F2 (1, 15) =
9.83, p = .01 and go past time (780 vs. 634), F1 (1, 83) =
19.0, p < .001, F2 (1, 15) = 5.15, p = .05
Discussion
References
Hypotheses
Endpoint hypothesis (EH): fixation time will be longer for
verbs with high PE scores only when PE is not a covariate
Patient role hypothesis (PRH): fixation time will be longer for
verbs with low CA scores only when CA is not a covariate
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant
1R15HD055680-01A1
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