Encoding transfer of possession events

The present study focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of giving and taking events. For both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, we find that the linguistic encoding of these transfer events respects the Thematic Hierarchy and the Source-Goal asymmetry (Exp.1 and 2): Agents are mentioned more often than Patient; Goals are encoded more often than Sources. However, in non-linguistic representation, the bias against Sources is not observed (Exp.3 and 4): Giver, Givee, Taker and Takee are equally prominent in memory. Taken together, our results support linguistic theories extending Source/Goal paths to Transfer of Possession events and call for a finer-grained account of homology between linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of events

On the Processing of might

This study examines the processing of the implicature of “might” (NOT must). The literature on implicatures contains both studies that suggest rapid computation of scalar implicatures, and studies that provide evidence for extra processing costs in generating them. The present study extends existing work by comparing “might” to “must”, and by adapting a paradigm that integrates experimental sentences into a natural discourse within a game. The experiment employed the visual world paradigm, using a guessing game with a confederate: in critical trials participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to utterances (guesses) made by a confederate. Our results show a delay in incorporating the ‘not must’ implicature of “might”, which is comparable in size to previous studies finding delays in implicature computation. Hence our results provide further support for the notion that implicatures incur processing cost, based on different implicature triggers and using an experimental paradigm based on natural dialogue

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking 6- to 8-year old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativisation. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically-appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extra-linguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive controls; and Study 3 related completion data and reading data. The results showed that comprehension difficulty was modulated by animacy configuration and voice (active vs. passive). These differences were well correlated with the availability of alternative interpretations as the relative clause unfolds, as revealed by the completion data. In contrast to approaches arguing that comprehension difficulty stems from syntactic complexity, these results suggest that semantic indeterminacy is a major source of comprehension difficulty in object relative clauses. Results are consistent with constraint-based approaches to ambiguity resolution and bring new insights into previously identified sources of difficulty. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure : distributional learning in a miniature language

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings

Scatter of Journals and Literature Obsolescence Reflected in Document Delivery Requests

In this paper we investigate the scattering of journals and literature obsolescence reflected in more than 137,000 document delivery requests submitted to a national document delivery service. W e first summarize the major findings of the study with regards to the performance of the service.We then identify the “core” journals from which article requests were satisfied and address the following research questions: (a) Does the distribution of core) journals conform to the Bradford’s Law of Scattering? (b) Is there a relationship between usage of journals and impact factors, journals with high impact factors being used more often than the rest? (c) Is there a relationship between usage of journals and total citation counts, journals with high total citation counts being used more often than the rest?(d) What is the median age of use (half-life) of requested articles in general? (e) Do requested articles that appear in core journals get obsolete more slowly? (f) Is there a relationship between obsolescence and journal impact factors, journals with high impact factors being obsolete more slowly? (g) Is there a relationship between obsolescence and total citation counts, journals with high total citation counts being obsolete more slowly? Based on the analysis of findings, we found that the distribution of highly and moderately used journal titles conform to Bradford’s Law.The median age of use was 8 years for all requested articles. Ninety percent of the articles requested were 21 years of age or younger.Articles that appeared in 168 core journal titles seem to get obsolete slightly more slowly than those of all titles.W e observed no statistically significant correlations between the frequency of journal use and ISI journal impact factors, and between the frequency of journal use and ISI-Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, PA) cited half-lives for the most heavily used 168 core journal titles.There was a weak correlation between usage of journals and ISI-reported total citation counts.No statistically significant relationship was found between median age of use and journal impact factors and between median age of use and total citation counts.There was a weak negative correlation between ISI journal impact factors and cited half-lives of 168 core journals, and a weak correlation between ISI citation halflives and use half-lives of core journals.No correlation was found between cited half-lives of 168 core journals and their corresponding total citation counts as reported by ISI.Findings of the current study are discussed along with those of other studies