Biomedical subjects

Matthew J Traxler

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew J Traxler.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Lexical mediation and context effects in sentence processing.

Studies of syntactic ambiguity resolution have played a central role in resolving questions about when and how contextual information affects parsing processes. These investigations are often couched in terms of modularity versus interaction, with demonstrations of rapid contextual effects being taken as evidence that the mechanisms responsible for structuring sentences are permeable to referential or semantic context, and therefore non-modular. In this paper, we will propose that argument relations are constructed on the basis of lexically stored syntactic representations (as in MacDonald, M.C., Pearlmutter, N.J., and Seidenberg, M.S. (1994). Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703. Pickering, M.J., and Traxler, M.J. (2004). Grammatical repetition and garden path effects. Paper presented to the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. College Park, MD., Pickering, M.J., and Traxler, M.J. (2006). Syntactic Priming in Comprehension. Manuscript in preparation. Traxler, M.J., and Pickering, M.J. (2005, March). Syntactic priming in comprehension. Paper presented to the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Tucson, AZ), but that other types of structural decisions are made on the basis of general processing principles. This formulation can be tested by looking at how the parser reacts to immediate intra- and inter-sentential factors (short-term context) and how it reacts to patterns of input over longer time scales (long-term context). We begin with a brief review of work on context effects in syntactic disambiguation, sketch our account of parsing, and then provide evidence from two eye-tracking experiments that illustrate some of the processing principles that govern parsing of argument relations.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

A time course analysis of enriched composition.

Linguistic analyses suggest that common and seemingly simple expressions, such as began the book, cannot be interpreted with simple compositional processes; rather, they require enriched composition to provide an interpretation, such as began reading the book (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1995). Recent reading time studies have supported these accounts by providing evidence that these expressions are more costly to process than are minimally contrasting controls (e.g., McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, and Jackendoff, 2001). We report a response signal speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) study in which two types of expressions that are thought to require enriched composition were examined. Analyses of the full time course SAT data indicate that these expressions were interpreted less accurately and, most importantly, more slowly than control sentences. The latter finding suggests that enriched composition requires the online deployment of complex compositional operations.

Comprehension↗

PubMed2005

Plausibility and verb subeategorization in temporarily ambiguous sentences: evidence from self-paced reading.

A self-paced reading experiment investigated processing of sentences containing a noun-phrase that could temporarily be mistaken as the direct-object argument of a verb in a subordinate clause but actually constituted the syntactic subject of the main clause (often referred to as an early vs. late closure ambiguity). Subcategorization preference of the subordinate verb and plausibility of the syntactic misanalysis were manipulated Elevated reading times occurred during processing of the temporarily ambiguous noun-phrase for those sentences where the noun-phrase was an implausible direct-object of the preceding verb, regardless of the verbs' subcategorization preferences. Elevated reading times were observed for all sentence types following syntactic disambiguation. Subsequent correlational analyses showed that the verbs' individual subcategorization preferences affected processing time on the critical noun-phrase and the syntactically disambiguating main verb.

Cognition↗

PubMed2005

The difficulty of coercion: a response to de Almeida.

The sentence The secretary began the memo requires specifying what event the secretary began, because the memo does not refer to an event. McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, and Jackendoff (2001) and Traxler, Pickering, and McElree (2002) found evidence from both self-paced reading and eye-tracking that such sentences caused processing difficulty, and thus argued that people "coerced" the object to refer to an event (e.g., writing the memo). de Almeida (2004) reports two self-paced reading experiments that failed to replicate some aspects of previous studies, and thereby argued against coercion during comprehension. A new experiment demonstrates coercion costs using new items, and provides evidence of coercion cost with de Almeida's stimuli. We conclude that coercion does cause processing difficulty.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

Plausibility and subcategorization preference in children's processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences: evidence from self-paced reading.

Three self-paced reading experiments investigated children's processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences. Across the three experiments, subcategorization preference of a verb in a subordinate clause and the semantic plausibility of the misanalysis were manipulated. Reading times in the temporarily ambiguous region and following syntactic disambiguation indicated that children in the age range tested (8 years, 11 months to 12 years, 11 months) routinely misanalyse sentences of the type tested, and their tendency to misanalyse the sentences does not depend on the subcategorization preferences of the initial verb. Additional correlational analyses suggested that subcategory information did affect the degree of difficulty that readers experienced processing the critical noun and matrix verb.

Child↗