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M K Tanenhaus

Publications and source records attributed to M K Tanenhaus.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1990

Levels of representation in the interpretation of anaphoric reference and instrument inference.

The level of representation accessed when inferences are made during sentence comprehension was examined. The inferences investigated included antecedent assignment for both definite noun phrase anaphors and pronouns and also instrument inferences. In making these inferences, a listener must access the inferred element, whether an antecedent or an instrument, in either a linguistic form representation or a discourse model. The level of representation involved in these inferences was determined by exploiting differences in the lexical decision and naming tasks, which were argued to exhibit differential sensitivity to representational levels. In three experiments, the priming of antecedent and instrument targets in the lexical decision task was compared with priming of the same targets in the naming task. Differences in the patterns of activation across the two tasks indicated that all three types of inferences required accessing elements in a discourse model. Three control experiments ruled out simple context or congruity checking as an explanation for our results. The following conclusions were also supported by these studies: (1) Antecedent assignment occurs immediately after processing an anaphor; (2) antecedent assignment involves inhibition for the inappropriate antecedent rather than facilitation for the appropriate antecedent; (3) although subjects do not make instrument inferences when they hear isolated sentences containing verbs that strongly imply certain instruments, the inferences are made when sentences are preceded by a context that mentions the instrument.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Lexical projection and the interaction of syntax and semantics in parsing.

A series of self-paced reading studies utilized an embedded anomaly technique to investigate long-distance dependencies with dative verbs. Previous research in our lab demonstrated that argument structure influences the gap-filling process. Experiment 1 extended that work by demonstrating that dative verbs pattern with other complex transitive verbs (i.e., a fronted filler that is implausible as the direct object will not be interpreted as the direct object until the absence of a noun phrase after the verb forces the postulation of a direct object gap. This pattern contrasts with that of transitive verbs that subcategorize for a single internal argument position, where fronted fillers are obligatorily interpreted as the direct object). Experiments 2 and 3 investigate the prediction that semantic analyses precede syntactic analyses in dative questions. It is argued that the lexical information about argument structure and thematic roles can guide semantic interpretation.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Lexical structure in Parsing long-distance dependencies.

We review a series of experiments investigating lexical influences in parsing sentences with long-distance dependencies. We report three primary results. First, gaps are posited and filled immediately following verbs that are typically used transitively, even when the filler is an implausible object of the verb. However, gaps are not posited after verbs that are typically used intransitively. Second, plausibility determines whether or not a filler is treated as the object of a verb when the verb is typically used with both a direct object and an infinitive complement. Finally, verb control information is used immediately in determining which noun phrase will be interpreted as the "understood" subject of an infinitive complement.

Cognition↗
PubMed1989

Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension.

Evoked brain potentials were used to monitor moment-by-moment decisions during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities for which one of the possible interpretations was semantically implausible. The N400 component of the evoked potential, which is sensitive to implausibility, was used to discover when during a sentence subjects made a decision about the ambiguity. The results demonstrate that readers try to interpret a syntactic ambiguity early in a sentence rather than waiting for disambiguating information. This introduces a new way to use brain activity to study sentence comprehension processes.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1989

Context and lexical access: implications of nonword interference for lexical ambiguity resolution.

To eliminate potential "backward" priming effects, Glucksberg, Kreuz, and Rho (1986) introduced a variant of the cross-modal lexical priming task in which subjects made lexical decisions to nonword targets that were modeled on a word related to either the contextually biased or unbiased sense of an ambiguous word. Lexical decisions to nonwords were longer than controls only when the nonword was related to the contextually biased sense of the ambiguous word, leading Glucksberg et al. to conclude that context does constrain lexical access and that the multiple access pattern observed in previous studies was probably an artifact of backward priming. We did not find nonword interference when the nonword targets used by Glucksberg et al. were preceded by semantically related ambiguous or unambiguous word primes. However, we did replicate their sentence context results when the ambiguous words were removed from the sentences. We conclude that the interference obtained by Glucksberg et al. is due to postlexical judgements of the congruence of the sentence context and the target, not to context constraining lexical access.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Functional clauses and sentence segmentation.

In two experiments subjects listened to a sentence containing a brief tone, then wrote out the sentence and marked the location of the tone. The experimental sentences were biclausal with the tone placed before or after the clause break. The initial clause was either functionally complete or functionally incomplete. Functionally complete clauses contain a complete set of fully specified grammatical relations, while functionally incomplete clauses do not. In Experiment 1 tones were mislocated toward the clause break and the final word of the first clause significantly more often for functionally complete clauses. Experiment 2 replicated this finding holding deep- and surface-structure variables constant. The results indicate that functionally complete clauses are better segmentation units during sentence perception than functionally incomplete clauses. Purely structural theories of the units of sentence perception cannot account for this finding.

Adult↗