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Adrian Staub Talk in Psychology

Candidate for Cognitive Psychology faculty position

Adrian Staub
UMass Amherst

The Timing of Syntactic Decisions

Thursday, December 6, 10:45-noon, Tobin 521b (open to everyone)

Abstract

A principal task for listeners and readers is to determine the syntactic structure of spoken or written input. A principal task for speakers is to honor grammatical requirements while communicating an intended message. In this talk, I will describe research that addresses the time course with which syntactic decisions are made in comprehension and production. First, I will describe several eye movement experiments demonstrating that readers analyze syntactic structure on a word-by-word basis, and that they use their knowledge of constraints imposed by the grammar to anticipate the syntactic structure of yet-to-be-encountered input. I will then describe ongoing research that investigates the time course with which language producers compute subject-verb agreement. It appears that while the process of determining a verb's number may begin in advance of producing the verb, there is also a decision process that takes place relatively late, i.e., when the verb itself is to be produced. I will suggest that contrasting conclusions from these two domains may reflect the different cognitive demands associated with comprehension and production.