Syntax and the accessibility of antecedents in relation to neurophysiological variation

Results of a word-by-word reading experiment argue for a specifically syntactic mechanism (N.B., not a discourse mechanism) that assigns antecedents to pronouns such as he and they, even though such assignments are grammatically optional and likely to be revised in many instances by subsequent discourse processes. These results argue for a modular view of mental architecture along the lines of Fodor (1983). However, this study also draws on certain new proposals concerning possible behaviorally significant variation in the neurophysiological substrates of language processing. Partitioning subjects on certain biological criteria reveals that, while the pattern described above seems to apply to the majority of subjects, there is a large minority that seems to showan importantly different pattern

Evidence for a Strictly Sentence-Internal Antecedent-Finding Mechanism

Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 41-5

The role of the language production system in shaping grammars.

We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures

FoodFab: creating food perception illusions using food 3D printing

Food 3D printing enables the creation of customized food structures based on a person’s individual needs. In this paper, we explore the use of food 3D printing to create perceptual illusions for controlling the level of perceived satiety given a defined amount of calories. We present FoodFab, a system that allows users to control their food intake through modifying a food’s internal structure via two 3D printing parameters: infill pattern and infill density. In two experiments with a total of 30 participants, we studied the effect of these parameters on users’ chewing time that is known to affect people’s feeling of satiety. Our results show that we can indeed modify the chewing time by varying infill pattern and density, and thus control perceived satiety. Based on the results, we propose two computational models and integrate them into a user interface that simplifies the creation of personalized food structures

Syntactic microvariation and methodology: problems and perspectives

Variation in empirical data has been a perseverant problem for theoretical linguistics, especially syntax. Data inconsistencies among authors allegedly analyzing the same phenomenon are ubiquitous in the syntactic literature (e.g., literature on focus-raising in Hungarian; É. Kiss 1987 vs. Lipták 1998), and partly result from the highly informal methodology of data collection. However, even if adequate controls are used to exclude potential biases, variation might remain. The general practice in syntactic research has been to ignore these „microvariations”-mainly in the lack of any systematic empirical method to detect them. The present paper shows that this practice leads to serious theoretical problems and proposes a new empirical method, cluster analysis, to discover, explore and systematize these variations. It also illustrates how this richer empirical basis gives rise to a more fine-grained theoretical analysis

Illicit Acceptability in picture NPs

Four experiments examine the interaction between extraction and specificity in picture NPs. The results indicate that the acceptability judgements of naive speakers show highly robust patterns that do not conform well to widely held assumptions about the relative acceptability of several theoretically important kinds of sentence. There is also evidence that the difference between argument and non-argument extractions has a marked impact on acceptability (though no such acceptability difference has figured in linguistic theory). Further, the paper argues that there are circumstances in which ungrammatical sentences may be rendered acceptable via the intrusion of extragrammatical mechanisms in comprehension. Thus, the acceptability of these sentences is 'illicit'.The work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (1 R01 NS22606-01)

Doing Experimental Syntax: Bridging the gap between syntactic questions and well-designed questionnaires

Chapter 3 in In search of grammar: Experimental and corpus-based studies, edited by James Myers. Book Description: Corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, and computer modeling can seem intimidating to linguists more familiar with the traditional low-tech methods of theoretical syntax, morphology, and phonology. Yet as this book demonstrates, it does not require much extra effort for grammarians to expand their methodological repertoire. Core contributions come from Wayne Cowart, author of the pioneering Experimental Syntax, and Michael Hammond, author of the standard reference The Phonology of English. They and four other contributing authors provide easy-to-follow tutorials and case studies on a variety of grammatical issues from Chinese, English, and other languages, using a variety of empirical methods. It is hoped that grammarians of all stripes, from syntacticians to phonologists, from formalists to functionalists, from students to professors, will find inspiration in this book for their own research