Linguistics 247: Seminar in Psycholinguistics: Sentence Processing
Win 2004
TuTh 10:00-11:30pm, 160-B36

Dan Jurafsky (jurafsky@stanford.edu)
Office hours: 113 Margaret Jacks, Tuesday 3:00-4:30 and by appt

Syllabus and Readings

WK
DATE
TOPIC/READING
1
Jan 6
Introduction Overview
Part I: Syntactic-y Stuff
1
Jan 8
Parsing Complexity

Edward Gibson. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68:1 1-76.
2
Jan 13
Complexity and Memory
Almor et al. 2001. Comprehension of long distance number agreement in probable Alzheimer's disease. Language and Cognitive Processes. Volume 16, Number 1, 35-63.
Traxler, M.J., Seely, R.E. & Morris, R.K. (2002). Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye-movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 69-90.
2
Jan 15
Parsing: Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
Townsend, David J. and Thomas G. Bever. "Sentence Comprehension". Chapter 4.
Maryellen C. MacDonald. 1993. The Interaction of Lexical and Syntactic Ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language 32: 692-715.
3
Jan 20
Parsing/Ambiguity Resolution II
Daniel Grodner, Edward Gibson and Susanne Tunstall. Syntactic Complexity in Ambiguity Resolution. JML 46:2, 267-295.
Fernanda Ferreira. 2003. The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology 47:2, 164-203.
3
Jan 22
Parsing/Ambiguity Resolution III
Gail McKoon and Roger Ratcliff. 2003. Meaning Through Syntax: Language Comprehension and the Reduced Relative Clause Construction. Psychological Review 110.3
Filip, Hana, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Gregory N. Carlson, Paul D. Allopenna, and Joshua Blatt. 2002. Reduced Relatives Judged Hard Require Constraint-Based Analyses. In Paola Merlo and Suzanne Stevenson (eds) "Sentence Processing and the lexicon: formal, computational, and experimental perspectives", Amsterdam: Benjamins, 255-280.
4
Jan 27
Contextual effects on syntactic disambiguation
Michael J. Spivey, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Kathleen M. Eberhard and Julie C. Sedivy. 2002. Eye movements and spoken language comprehension: Effects of visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Cognitive Psychology 45:4, 447-481.
Kamide, Yuki, Gerry Altmann, and Sarah L. Haywood. 2003 The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. plus Corrigendum Journal of Memory and Language 49, 133-156
Part II: Semantic-y Stuff
4
Jan 29
Verbal Semantics
Jean-Pierre Koenig, Gail Mauner, and Breton Bienvenue. Arguments for Adjuncts. Cognition 89:2, 67-103.
Gail McKoon and Talke Macfarland. 2002. Event templates in the lexical representations of verbs. Cognitive Psychology 45:1, 1-44.
5
Feb 3
Propositions

Walter Kintsch. 2001. Predication. Cognitive Science, 25:2, 173-202.
Raluca Budiu, and John R. Anderson. In Press. Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science.
5
Feb 5
Scope and start of Space
Kurtzman, H. S., and M. C. MacDonald. 1993. Resolution of Quantifier Scope Ambiguities. Cognition 48:243--279.
Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? English and Mandarin speakers' conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1-22.
6
Feb 10
Probability and Frequency
Martin J. Pickering, Matthew J. Traxler and Matthew W. Crocker. 2000. Ambiguity Resolution in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Frequency-Based Accounts. JML 43:3, 447-475.
One other paper to be named later.
6
Feb 12
Semantics and Space
Matlock, T., Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2003). The experiential basis of meaning. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Matlock, T. (to appear). Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory and Cognition.
7
Feb 17
Semantics and Space: perceptual-motor representations
Richardson, D. C., Spivey, M. J., McRae, K., & Barsalou, L. W. (2003). Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science, 27, 767-780.
Part III: Prosody
7
Feb 19
Prosody and Syntactic Disambiguation
Schafer, A.J., Speer, S.R., Warren, P., & White, S.D. 2000. Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 169-182.
Katy Carlson, Charles Clifton, Jr. and Lyn Frazier. 2001. Prosodic Boundaries in Adjunct Attachment. JML 45:1, 58-81.
Price, Patti, Mari Ostendorf, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and C. Fong. 1991. The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90: 2956-2970.
8
Feb 24
Prosody and Syntactic Disambiguation (II)
Jun, Sun-Ah. 2003. Prosodic Phrasing and Attachment Preferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32:3.
Jesse Snedeker and John Trueswell. 2003. Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and Language 48.1, 103-130
Duane Watson and Edward Gibson. in press. Making Sense of the Sense Unit Condition. Linguistic Inquiry squib.
8
Feb 26
Accent and Focus
Optional background reading: Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Chapter 13: Focus and Focus Identification. In Kadmon, Nirit, Formal Pragmatics. Blackwell.
D. Beaver, B. Clark, E. Flemming, and M. Wolters. In preparation. Second Occurrence Focus is Prosodically Marked: Results of a Production Experiment.
Handout from D. Beaver, B. Clark, E. Flemming, and F. Jaeger The perception of second occurrence focus. Presented at LSA Annual Mtg, January 2004.
Welby, Pauline. 2003. Effects of Pitch Accent Position, Type, and Status on Focus Projection. Language and Speech 46, 53 -- 81
9
Mar 2
Prosody and Disfluency
Arnold, J. E., Fagnano, M., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2003). Disfluencies signal theee, um, new information. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 32(1), 25-36
Karl G. D. Bailey and Fernanda Ferreira. 2003. Disfluencies affect the parsing of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 49:2, 183-200.
9
Mar 4
Anaphora (I)
Background Reading: Kehler, Andy. 2000. Discourse. Chapter 18 of Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky and Martin.
Brennan, S. E. 1995. Centering attention in discourse. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 137-167.
10
Mar 9
Anaphora (II)
Patrick Sturt. 2003. The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 48:3, 542-562.
Keller, Frank, and Ash Asudeh (2001). Constraints on linguistic coreference: Structural vs. pragmatic factors. In Proceedings of the 23rd. Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 483-488. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
10
Mar 11
"Tom Wasow and Colleagues" Day
Arnold, Jennifer, Thomas Wasow, Ash Asudeh, and Pete Alrenga. (ms). Avoiding Attachment Ambiguities: the Role of Constituent Ordering. PDF of paper and PDF of Table 2
Clark, Herbert and Thomas Wasow. 1998. Repeating Words in Spontaneous Speech. Cognitive Psychology 37, 201-242.