Linguistics Seminar Talk - Rosa (Eun-Kyoung) Lee

Title:  Using argument roles in verb prediction: What are the sources of variability?

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that comprehenders initially fail to use argument role information during prediction (e.g., Chow et al., 2016). The majority of evidence comes from EEG findings that report similar N400 responses to verbs following role-appropriate and role-reversed contexts (e.g., ...which customer the waitress had served vs. ...which waitress the customer had served). On the contrary, (speeded cloze) production studies have shown that people rapidly use argument roles in prediction. In this talk, I will present findings from a series of work that attempts to narrow the comprehension-production contrast and what those results tell us about the potential sources of variability in role-sensitivity, i.e., under what conditions argument roles are effectively parsed and used in prediction. I approach the question in two ways: 1) thinking about the relation between speaking and understanding, and 2) examining item-wise variability.