Riven, Levi (2011) Context breeds false recognition for indeterminate sentences. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
Preview |
Text (application/pdf)
773kBRiven_MA_F2011.pdf - Accepted Version |
Abstract
Over the last decade, there has been considerable debate concerning the processes governing the comprehension of indeterminate sentences such as (A) Lisa began the book, and how they come to be understood as something like (B) Lisa began reading the book. A major theme in this debate concerns the role of context in facilitating comprehension. Research shows that the costs associated with processing indeterminate expressions (e.g., McElree et al., 2001) are attenuated when these sentences are preceded by a sufficiently supporting context (de Almeida, 2004). A plausible explanation for this observation is that context facilitates comprehension by activating knowledge in support of inferential processes. This view lies in contrast to the coercion hypothesis, for which indeterminate sentences are enriched by default as a function of retrieving internal properties of the nominal book (Pustejovsky, 1995). In the present study, we employed a discourse-based sentence recognition paradigm (Sachs, 1967), investigating whether a strongly biasing context facilitates comprehension of indeterminate sentences. Our goal was to determine whether the interpretation of indeterminate sentences is facilitated by context manipulations that tap into inferential processes rather than constituent features of the complement noun. We found that participants (N = 72) drew systematic inferences from the context to the extent that they recognized sentences such as (B) from the discourse, when in fact, they were only exposed to indeterminate sentences such as (A). These results were obtained when proposed elements of the coercion hypothesis were experimentally and statistically controlled, suggesting that context facilitates comprehension of indeterminate sentences by triggering pragmatic inferences.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Psychology |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Riven, Levi |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | Psychology |
| Date: | 30 July 2011 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | de Almeida, Roberto G. |
| Keywords: | false memory; sentence processing; discourse processing; indeterminacy; coercion; enrichment; pragmatic inferences |
| ID Code: | 15110 |
| Deposited By: | LEVI RIVEN |
| Deposited On: | 21 Nov 2011 16:17 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2018 17:35 |
References:
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,57, 289-300.Bransford, J. D., & Franks, J. J. (1971). The abstraction of linguistic ideas. Cognitive Psychology, 2, 331-350.
Bransford, J. D., Barclay, J. R., & Franks, J. J. (1972). Sentence memory: A constructive versus interpretive approach. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 193-209.
Briscoe, T., Copestake, A., & Boguraev, B. (1990). Enjoy the paper: Lexical semantics via lexicology. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 42-47). Helsinki: Association of Computational Linguistics.
Cohen, J., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M., & Provost, J. (1993). Psyscope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 25, 257-271.
de Almeida, R. G. (2004). The effect of context on the processing of type-shifting verbs. Brain and Language. 90, 249-261.
de Almeida, R. G., & Dwivedi, V. D. (2008). Coercion without lexical decomposition: Type-shifting effects revisited. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 53, 301-326.
de Almeida, R. G., & Riven, L. (2011). Indeterminacy and the source of coercion effects: minimal representations with pragmatic enrichment. Manuscript submitted for publication.
de Almeida, R. G., Riven, L., Manouilidou, C., Lungu, O., Dwivedi, V., Jarema, G., & Gillon, B. S. (2011). Resolving sentence indeterminacy pragmatically: An fMRI study on ‘Coercion.’ Manuscript submitted for publication.
Fillenbaum, S. (1966). Memory for gist: Some relevant variables. Language and Speech, 9, 217-227.
Fodor, J. A., & Lepore, E. (1998). The emptiness of the lexicon: Critical reflections on J. Pustejovsky’s ‘The Generative Lexicon.’ Linguistic Inquiry, 29, 269-288.
Fodor, J. A. & Lepore, E. (2002). The Compositionality Papers. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Frege, G. (1923/1963). Compound thoughts. Mind, 72, 1-17.
Jackendoff, R. (1997). The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jahn, G. (2004). Three turtles in danger: Spontaneous construction of causally relevant spatial situation models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 969-987.
Kline, R. B. (2004). Beyond Significance Testing: Reforming Data Analysis Methods in Behavioural Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Lapata, M., & Lascarides, A. (2003). A probabilistic account of logical metonymy. Computational Linguistics, 29, 261-315.
Lapata, M., Keller, F., & Scheepers, C. (2003). Intra-sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 27, 649-668.
McElree, B., Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. J., Seely, R. E., & Jackendoff, R. (2001). Reading time evidence for enriched composition. Cognition, 78, B17-B25.
McElree, B., Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2006). Deferred interpretations: Why starting Dickens is taxing but reading Dickens isn’t. Cognitive Science, 30, 181-192.
Pelletier, F. J. (1994). The principle of semantic compositionality. Topoi, 13, 11-24.
Pickering, M. J., McElree, B., & Traxler, M. J., (2005). The difficulty of coercion: A response to de Almeida. Brain and Language, 93, 1-9.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Pustejovsky, J. & Boguraev, P. (1996). Lexical Semantics: The Problem of Polysemy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Rink, M., Hannel, A., & Becker, G. (2001). Using temporal information to construct, update, and retrieve situation models of narratives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 67-80.
Sachs, J. (1967). Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse. Perception and Psychophysics, 2, 437-442.
Sachs, J. (1974). Memory in reading and listening to discourse. Memory and Cognition, 2, 95-100.
Shaffer, J. P. (1995). Multiple hypothesis testing. Annual Review of Psychology, 46, 561-584.
Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. H., & McElree., B. (2002). Coercion in sentence processing: evidence from eye movements and self-paced reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 530-547.
Traxler, M. J., McElree, B., Williams, R. S., & Pickering, M. J. (2005). Context effects in coercion: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 1-25.
Repository Staff Only: item control page
Download Statistics
Download Statistics