心理语言学线上论坛 | 6月16日12:00 Brian Dillon and Maayan Keshev 教授讲座

Speaker: Brian Dillon and Maayan Keshev 

Title: Encoding and accessing syntactic structure in memory: Insights from verbal agreement 

Time: 12:00 – 13:30, Wed, 16th June, 2021  

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker

Brian Dillon is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His area of specialization is psycholinguistics. His work focuses on the real-time computation of syntactic dependencies, focusing on the processing of agreement and anaphoric dependencies in English, Mandarin, and other languages.

Maayan Keshev is a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her area of specialization is psycholinguistics. She has published extensively on Hebrew sentence processing, addressing a range of topics such as filler-gap processing, agreement attraction, grammatical islands, resumptive pronouns, and noisy-channel processing.

Encoding and accessing syntactic structure in memory: Insights from verbal agreement 

Brian Dillon and Maayan Keshev 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

"Grammatical illusions" occur when speakers and listeners seem unable to faithfully apply their grammatical knowledge during the course of analyzing or producing language (Phillips, Wagers, and Lau, 2011). The distribution of grammatical illusions across constructions and across languages has led to insights into the nature of the cognitive mechanisms that speakers use during the course of routine language comprehension and production. In this talk, we will focus on one grammatical illusion: agreement attraction, the tendency for speakers to express verb agreement with nouns other than the intended agreement target (e.g. 'The key to the cabinets are rusty'; Bock & Miller, 1991). This phenomenon has proven to be a useful test case to better understand how morpho-syntactic features are bound to syntactic structure during real-time language production and comprehension, revealing the limits of how speakers can encode and maintain syntactic structure in working memory. 

In this talk, we will overview a range of evidence that suggests that agreement attraction likely reflects the contribution of multiple distinct underlying mechanisms, including errors in encoding syntactic structure in a noise-prone memory architecture and errors in retrieval of syntactic encodings during incremental processing. We will also overview how these basic mechanisms of encoding and retrieval interference are shaped by cross-linguistic grammatical differences, and how they impact different types of grammatical dependencies such as reflexive agreement.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: 

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)