A Neurophysiological Investigation of Wh-Islands

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 187-20

Method to Predict the Potential Regional Long-Term Timber Supply Using GIS and Other Publicly Available Data

While the global demand for wood products is on the rise, timber production has shifted from the Pacific Northwest to the southeastern United States in recent times. The increase in harvesting makes accurate assessment of the South\u27s wood supply essential. Anew method is proposed for looking at the potential supply of raw woody material. The test area was three southeastern Arkansas counties. A geographic information system (GIS) using ArcView software incorporates two sources of public information. First, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data from the USDA Forest Service were queried to find land areas and volumes by timber type, as well as growth and removals. Second, Gap Analysis Program (GAP) data were included to delineate land cover patterns. FIA growth rates were applied to the corresponding timber types. Additionally, vector layers such as roads, streams, and power lines were buffered, and those areas were then subtracted from forested land cover types. The losses to buffered areas were approximately 7 percent. The FIA data were manipulated to determine a cubic meter growth rate per year. The study revealed that the study area is capable of supplying 2,034.7 thousand cubic meters of wood per year, while the FIA data for the same area showed 2,150.9 thousand cubic meters. With both the FIA and GAP data being updated every 5-10 years, values can easily be updated to reflect changes

Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true in OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to these responses. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages. Our results also suggest that the marking of the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of such marking in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.Linguistic

Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean

Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O’Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).Linguistic

Assessing the Cost of Best Management Practices in Arkansas

A geographic information system (GIS) is a set of powerful, computer-based, analytical algorithms for solving spatial data problems. Recently, due to increases in memory size, computing speed, and programming advances, personal computers have been used in spatial analysis problems. This study reports the benefits of using a PC-based GIS system to solve a common, but complicated problem in forest management: assignment of harvesting areas with harvesting exclusion zones. Two stands each from the USDA Crossett Experimental Forest, the University of Arkansas Forest, and the Ouachita National Forest (total six) were analyzed to determine the changes due to following best management practices (BMPs) and by excluding sensitive areas from harvesting activity with stream-side management zones (SMZs). A onetime loss land, averaging seven percent of the forest land, was taken out of production due to the implementation of SMZs. Benefit cost ratios of harvestable timber value to harvesting cost decreased with the imposition of SMZs, but the judicious use of portable bridging to span SMZs at critical locations mitigated losses significantly

Assessing the Cost of Best Management Practices in Arkansas

A geographic information system (GIS) is a set of powerful, computer-based, analytical algorithms for solving spatial data problems. Recently, due to increases in memory size, computing speed, and programming advances, personal computers have been used in spatial analysis problems. This study reports the benefits of using a PC-based GIS system to solve a common, but complicated problem in forest management: assignment of harvesting areas with harvesting exclusion zones. Two stands each from the USDA Crossett Experimental Forest, the University of Arkansas Forest, and the Ouachita National Forest (total six) were analyzed to determine the changes due to following best management practices (BMPs) and by excluding sensitive areas from harvesting activity with stream-side management zones (SMZs). A onetime loss land, averaging seven percent of the forest land, was taken out of production due to the implementation of SMZs. Benefit cost ratios of harvestable timber value to harvesting cost decreased with the imposition of SMZs, but the judicious use of portable bridging to span SMZs at critical locations mitigated losses significantly

Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean

: Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O’Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006)

Isolating Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts *

Introduction The phenomenon referred to as negative islands was originally observed by (1) a. Which project didn't the intern complete __ conscientiously? b. *How didn't the intern complete the project __? A number of proposals have been made in the theoretical linguistics literature that account for the difference between (1a) and (1b) in terms of global constraints operating within the grammar. Building on previous findings in the psycholinguistics literature, we used acceptability judgment measures to provide a new window into our understanding of negative islands. On the basis of results from two such studies, we argue that negative islands are not a unitary phenomenon due to a single global grammatical constraint, but rather the by-product of the simultaneous co-occurrence of different processing factors. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we show that alongside the global constraints proposed in existing accounts of negative islands, there is abundant evidence in the psycholinguistics literature that each of the individual factors that figure into negative islands -namely negation, extraction, and referentiality -incurs its own processing cost. The results from the acceptability judgment studies reported in section 3 demonstrate the importance of taking these individual factors into consideration when analyzing negative islands. In Experiment 1, we investigate the effects of the factors negation and extraction, and in Experiment 2 we additionally manipulate the factor of referentiality. In section 4, we discuss the results of these experiments and sugges

Verb phrase ellipsis: The view from information structure.

Abstract Findings from three experimental studies are presented in support of the hypothesis that the reduced acceptability associated with antecedent mismatch under ellipsis reflects violation of an information structural constraint governing contrastive topic structures, and not an ellipsis-specific licensing constraint as previously assumed. Magnitude estimation data show that the penalty associated with a mismatched antecedent is larger for contrastive topic ellipses as compared to ellipses which exhibit simple (non-contrastive topic) focus. The same pattern of acceptability is also observed for non-ellipsis controls, however. Online reading times indicate increased processing costs associated with antecedent mismatch, and the cost is greater in contrastive topic as compared to simple focus ellipses. Elevated reading times for mismatched contrastive topics are observed throughout the target clause, however, including regions prior to the ellipsis site.