Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic and Interpretive Dependency Formation in Agreement Attraction

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

For typical adult native speakers, understanding sentences feels very easy. In fact, we know from prior research that comprehension is a highly complex mental process that requires speakers to coordinate sophisticated implicit knowledge about the structure of their language with the appropriate perceptual and memory operations under immense time pressure. While humans are remarkably skilled at this challenging task, they sometimes arrive at erroneous interpretations that are inconsistent with the linguistic input they received. Understanding the mechanisms that lead to misinterpretations in neurotypical adult native speakers is an important step towards a better understanding of the problems experienced by populations that have difficulties with language comprehension, such as second language learners or people with language disorders. This project investigates to what extent memory retrieval errors contribute to misinterpretation in sentence processing. Language comprehension frequently requires establishing morphosyntactic and interpretive relationships between non-adjacent words, such that the earlier word has to be retrieved from memory. For example, in the sentence 'The boy next to the beautiful trees probably does not hear the music', the verb 'does' has to agree in number with the subject head 'boy', even though many words intervene between the subject head and the verb. Memory retrieval is susceptible to similarity-based interference. Therefore, previous research has shown that comprehenders are less likely to notice subject-verb agreement violations in the presence of a non-subject noun that matches the verb in number (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are rusty'), presumably because sometimes the number-matching non-subject noun is misretrieved from memory instead of the target. Here the researchers will use methods of evaluating real-time language comprehension such as tracking eye movements during reading to investigate how misretrieval in subject-verb agreement impacts the interpretation of the sentence. Interference in memory retrieval has been linked to comprehension difficulties in unskilled readers and has been proposed as the primary source of processing differences between native speakers and second language learners. A better understanding of how basic properties of memory retrieval can contribute to misinterpretations will help us understand how language comprehension is impacted for these less successful language users.