Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Posters 5114–5120 Saturday Evening
(e.g., “couch”). These effects indicate that manipulation features are
an intrinsic part of the lexical-semantic representation of objects.
These results are compared with fixation patterns of apraxic patients
who have deficits in producing and comprehending voluntary movements,
in order to determine whether such deficits result in a concomitant
impairment in the lexical-semantic representation of manipulable
objects.
(5114)
Priming Effects Without Semantic or Associative Links Through
Collocation. WILLIAM J. BONK & ALICE F. HEALY, University of
Colorado, Boulder (sponsored by L. E. Bourne, Jr.)—This study investigates
priming effects for verb–object collocate pairs (e.g., “pay attention”);
such words tend to co-occur by linguistic convention, rather than
by meaning. The words in collocate pairs do not share semantic features,
and do not cue each other in association norm tasks. In this experiment,
naming times for targets preceded by established collocates are
compared with those for unrelated words and for neutral primes (the
word “blank”) in both forward (verb–noun) and backward (noun–verb)
conditions. Collocationally related words provided automatic priming
effects, as compared with both the neutral and the unrelated prime words
as baselines. This finding supports the hypothesis that words automatically
make their conventional partners active in memory, potentially facilitating
both language comprehension and production. It appears that
this activation is not semantically based but is, rather, the result of
experience-based direct connections between lexical entries in memory.
(5115)
Two Stages of Sentence Comprehension in Patients with Alzheimer’s
Disease. GLORIA S. WATERS, Boston University, & DAVID N. CAP-
LAN, Massachusetts General Hospital—The sentence comprehension
abilities of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) and
age- and education-matched controls were assessed using a sentence
acceptability and a sentence plausibility judgment task. The stimulus
materials were created so that the acceptability judgments could be
made simply on the basis of syntactic acceptability, whereas a search
of real-world knowledge was required for plausibility judgments. Syntactic
complexity of the stimulus materials was also manipulated in
both tasks. Performance of the patients was poorer than that of the
control subjects. All subjects performed more poorly on the plausibility
task than on the acceptability task. However, differences between
the tasks were much greater for DAT patients than for control
subjects. The results are interpreted as showing evidence that DAT patients
are much more sensitive to increases in processing load at two
stages of sentence comprehension.
(5116)
When Good Enough Parsing Is Not Good Enough: Error Signals and
Reanalysis. KIEL CHRISTIANSON, University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, & TIMOTHY J. SLATTERY, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst—In experiments exploring garden path sentences (GPs), such
as “While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods,” Christianson
et al. (2001) discovered that interpretations derived from GPs are often
not faithful to the input. Instead, interpretations reflect lingering effects
of the initial GP parse. In this study, eye movements were recorded as
participants read GPs and non-GPs containing commas, followed by,
for example, “The man was hunting a deer (bear) in the woods.” The
results showed classic GP effects of longer reading times (RTs) and
more regressions in the GPs. When the noun in the subsequent sentence
did not match the previous one, RTs and regressions increased,
suggesting lingering effects of the GP, in addition to large effects of
the noun mismatch. RTs on the mismatched noun did not differ as a
function of the GP, however. We discuss the results in terms of “good
enough” syntactic and semantic representations.
(5117)
Arriving and Struggling the Veterinarian: Lexical Guidance in
Parsing, Revisited. ADRIAN STAUB & CHARLES E. CLIFTON, Uni-
140
versity of Massachusetts, Amherst—Several previous studies (Adams,
Clifton, & Mitchell, 1998; Mitchell, 1987; van Gompel and Pickering,
2001) have examined whether readers experience processing difficulty
on a noun phrase immediately following an intransitive verb,
with inconclusive results. In an eyetracking experiment, we explored
the hypothesis that a relevant factor is whether the intransitive verb is
an unaccusative (e.g., arrive) or an unergative (e.g., struggle). We suspected
that readers might experience more difficulty with unergatives
than with unaccusatives, since the underlying syntax of unaccusatives
categorically prohibits a direct object. In fact, we found that readers
experienced significant difficulty on a postverbal noun phrase with
each type of intransitive, as compared with transitive verbs, as reflected
in both first-pass and go-past reading times. Furthermore, the
two verb types did not differ significantly from each other. These results
support parsing theories holding that the parser does not initially
make use of verb argument structure information.
(5118)
Unrepairable Garden Paths Reveal Reanalysis Processing. FER-
NANDA FERREIRA & EDWARD M. HUSBAND, Michigan State
University (sponsored by Fernanda Ferreira)—The time course of reanalysis
processes in sentence comprehension was examined in two
experiments using a modified version of the speed–accuracy tradeoff
design. The first experiment used experimenter-paced phrase-byphrase
visual presentation, and the second used a saccade-contingent
self-paced visual presentation. Subjects made rapid acceptability
judgments when prompted by a beep at one of four delays after reading
the disambiguating phrase. A second judgment, without time pressure,
followed the speeded response. The results from both acceptability
judgments and eye movement behavior suggest that reanalysis
includes a lexical reaccess step for garden paths involving alternative
verb argument structures, but not for those that require just structural
revisions. The results are consistent with reprocessing views of reanalysis
and provide indirect support for serial models of initial parsing.
(5119)
Relative Clause Comprehension in Mandarin. YOWYU LIN &
SUSAN M. GARNSEY, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign—
Speakers of both English and Japanese find object-relative clauses
harder to understand than subject relatives. Although these languages
differ in many ways (default word order, whether relative clauses follow
or precede the head nouns they modify, etc.), they have in common
that subject relatives follow the default word order pattern,
whereas object relatives do not. In contrast, in Mandarin, it is object
relatives that have the default word order, leading Hsiao and Gibson
(2003) to predict that they should be easier in Mandarin; they collected
reading time data that provided weak support for their prediction.
In two Mandarin reading time studies, we found and replicated
robust support for this prediction, but we also found that differences
between subject and object relatives disappeared when head nouns
were less confusable with other nouns in the sentences, consistent
with Lewis’s (1999) claims about the role of similarity-based interference
during sentence comprehension.
(5120)
Effects of Event Possibility and Likelihood on Eye Movements in
Reading. TESSA C. WARREN & KERRY A. MCCONNELL, University
of Pittsburgh—Eye movement reactions to semantic anomalies
provide information about the time course over which different
sources of information become available to the language comprehension
system during reading (Rayner, Warren, Juhasz, & Liversedge,
2004). Although many studies have investigated the impact of anomaly
severity on eye-movement latencies (e.g., Murray & Rowan, 1998;
Rayner et al., 2004), little work has investigated effects of sources of
information, such as event likelihood or possibility, that contribute to
anomalies (cf. Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004). This
experiment recorded eye movements over sentences with a possible
and likely event, sentences with a possible but extremely unlikely