CogSci 2011 papers uploaded

In case, there’s interest, have a look at the papers to be presented at this year’s Cognitive Science meeting in Boston (July, 20th-23rd). HLP lab will be represented by two talks and four posters. The two talks will presenting work employing artificial language learning to address questions about typological generalizations:

• Masha Fedzechkina(BCS, University of Rochester) will present evidence that language learners are biased to reduced the uncertainty in the mapping from form to meaning. Her work is comparing the acquisition of miniature languages with and without case-marking in terms of to what extent learners tend to regularize or even fix variable word orders for these two types of languages (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2011). Together with other recent work (e.g. by Newport, by Culbertson), this work provides evidence that language learners deviate from the input provided to them in a predictable manner. In this case, we designed the experiment to directly test the functionalist claim that language learners are biases towards acquiring languages that support communication (cf. Bates and MacWhinney’s early work).
• Hal Tily (BCS, MIT) will present work employing a novel web-based artificial language learning paradigm, in which hundreds of participants can be run within a matter of a few days. Using this paradigm, we first replicated and extended a well-known study on determiner learning (Hudson Kam and Newport, 2004) and then investigate to what extent cross-linguistically observed quantitative patterns in argument and determiner order are replicated by language learners. We discuss how this paradigm will facilitate further tests of typological generalizations (Tily, Frank, & Jaeger, 2011).

Two poster presentations will be given on rapid and long-term adaptation to changes in syntactic distributions:

Celebrating Tom Wasow: A Festschrift

At this year’s CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Emily Bender and Jennifer Arnold presented a Festschrift celebrating Thomas Wasow. Here’s what the publisher’s site (CSLI) says (picture taken from the publisher’s website, which is hopefully ok; see the book for copyrights):

This book is a collection of papers on language processing, usage, and grammar, written in honor of Tom Wasow to commemorate his career on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Tom is a professor of linguistics and philosophy. But more accurately, he is a renaissance academic, having done work that connects with many different disciplines, including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and philosophy. Appropriately, this book reflects the diversity of Tom’s research and interests, including topics from multiple branches of linguistics and human information processing. These papers are written with minimal background assumed, so they can be used as teaching materials for beginning scholars. As such, this volume is a tribute to what is perhaps Tom’s most lasting contribution to the field—the mentorship and inspiration he provided to his students and collaborators, many of whom have contributed to this volume.

The book contains introductory and overview articles on a variety of topics in cognitive science from Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger, Stephan Oepen, Ash Asudeh, Peter Sells, Amy Perfors, James Paul Gee, John R. Rickford, T. Florian Jaeger, Jennifer E. Arnold, Harry J. Tily, Neal Snider, John A. Hawkins, and Susanne Riehemann.

Comment on our article in LLC

The Language and Linguistics Compass (LLC) has launched a new joint project with LinguistList, so that they now showcase selected LLC articles on LinguistList. You get free access to these articles for that time and can comment on them in a moderated forum.

If you have time, have a look at and possibly add to the discussion forum on Jaeger & Norcliffe. 2009. The Cross-linguistic Study of Sentence Production, 3(4), 866 – 88. It just was posted, so it’s probably still scarily empty .

Psycholinguistics in the field 2, CUNY Poster

And here is one more poster on Yucatec, following Lindsay’s example. This is work by Lis Norcliffe, who just graduated from Stanford and join the MPI in Nijmegen. Her thesis work is on the (possibly resumptive) morphology discussed in this poster and the experiments were part of that thesis, too. You’ll find effects of definiteness and dependency length, which we investigated since they (in our view) provide evidence that this morphological reduction alternation is affected by both a preference for uniform information density and a preference for dependency minimization. Feedback welcome.

Psycholinguistics in the field, CUNY Sentence Processing poster

We presented the results of the animacy and accessibility study on Yucatec on March 18, 2010 at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference in New York (see image below, or download the poster pdf file here: CUNY 2010 Sentence Processing poster Yucatec. See poster pdf file for additional data, abbreviations and references). We encountered a lot of support for our project and a lot of enthusiasm for continuing research. Soooooooo, stay tuned for more production studies on Yucatec to be carried out this summer.

Results of animacy and accessibility in Yucatec

Good news! We’ve analyzed the previously mentioned experiment on animacy and word order in Yucatec. We coded animacy of the Agent and Patient referents (human, animal, inanimate), transitivity (transitive, intransitive) and voice (active, passive, other) of the verb. We also coded the definiteness of the Agent and Patient referents (definite, indefinite).

Overall, Agent-Verb-Patient word order was strongly preferred (see Table 1). Moreover, human subjects were more likely to appear earlier in the sentence (ps<0.0001, interaction n.s., N=597), which is predicted by direct accessibility accounts. Human agents and patients were were more likely to be described as definite (ps<0.0002), and definite NPs showed a tendency to be mentioned earlier (agent: p<0.0001; patient: n.s., interaction p<0.0001). Still, the effect of animacy held independently (ps<0.002; interaction n.s.). The agent animacy effect was somewhat mediated by an effect on transitivity (whether participants described an event as e.g. an apple hitting a man or an apple falling on a man in that inanimate agents were less often described transitively (p<0.0001; no patient effects). The agent animacy effect remained significant even for transitive sentences (p<0.004; no interaction, N=502). In terms of the effects of voice, human agents correlated with the use of active voice (p<0.0001), and human patients correlated with the use of passive voice, though not at strongly (p<0.03, N=604).

Table: Word order and voice

Agent, Patient and Verb of 531 transitives (excluding 161 non-transitives)

Word order	Total	Active	Passive	Other
Agent-Verb-Patient	440	427	7	6
Patient-Verb-Agent	63	2	61	0
Other	28	20	7	1

What does this mean? Good news! Interesting results. In Yucatec, the passive voice is encoded by verbal morphology. Passive voice does not presuppose or preclude a word order change. When a patient was human, sentences were more likely to be in the passive voice. Moreover, human patients were more likely to be mentioned earlier. So, we’ve seen the use of passive voice morphology and earlier mention with human patients.

Visiting the Yucatan: more studies on Yucatec Mayan and Mexican Spanish

Heya. There are no results yet, but Katrina Housel, Carlos Gomez Gallo, and I just came back from the Valladolid, Mexico where we piloted and ran 3 studies on Yucatec and 4 studies on Mexican Spanish.

Bibliography: Cross-linguistic work on sentence production

Elisabeth Norcliffe and I are currently working on a short summary paper on cross-linguistic psycholinguistic work on sentence production (experiments and corpus studies w/ a sufficiently large sample and quantitative investigation). We would like to focus this effort on research on:

• accessibility effects on word order, voice, and other morphosyntactic variations
• radical vs moderate incrementality during sentence formulation
• syntactic persistence (within and across languages)
• agreement
• disfluencies (but not speech errors)

If you know of work in any of these areas that we should consider, we would appreciate your feedback. Just leave a comment at the bottom of this page (it’s a moderated forum, so it will not appear immediately, but usually it does not take us longer than a day to accept your posts). You can also send an email to Florian.

Fresh of the press: Preliminary Mayan results … [Norcliffe & Jaeger]

The orange juice is still warm, the cafe con helado barely melted, the Mexican music that has been playing on repeat for the last couple of hours still swings mind-numbingly in my fried brain (it’s VERY hot and humid here), and here we are: letting you, dear reader [sic], know what the world is waiting for: is there probability-sensitive morphosyntactic production in Yucatec Mayan (similar to English, cf. Frank & Jaeger, 2008-CUNY, 2008-CogSci; Jaeger, 2006-thesis, 207-LSA; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Wasow et al., in press)? This is a follow-up on a recent post.