Category: Announcements

Congrats to Nate Arnett, whose paper “Subject encodings and retrieval interference” has been published by Journal of Memory and Language, the leading journal for psycholinguistic research. The citation and abstract are below.

Arnett, Nathan, & Wagers, Matthew (2017). Subject encodings and retrieval interference. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 22-54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.07.005.

Interference has been identified as a cause of processing difficulty in linguistic dependencies, such as the subject-verb relation (Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003). However, while mounting evidence implicates retrieval interference in sentence processing, the nature of the retrieval cues involved – and thus the source of difficulty – remains largely unexplored. Three experiments used self-paced reading and eyetracking to examine the ways in which the retrieval cues provided at a verb characterize subjects. Syntactic theory has identified a number of properties correlated with subjecthood, both phrase-structural and thematic. Findings replicate and extend previous findings of interference at a verb from additional subjects, but indicate that retrieval outcomes are relativized to the syntactic domain in which the retrieval occurs. One, the cues distinguish between thematic subjects in verbal and nominal domains. Two, within the verbal domain, retrieval is sensitive to abstract syntactic properties associated with subjects and their clauses. We argue that the processing at a verb requires cue-driven retrieval, and that the retrieval cues utilize abstract grammatical properties which may reflect parser expectations.

WLMA (Workshop on the Languages of Meso-America) [‘wɪlmə] is a freshly launched working group, bringing together students and faculty interested in languages of Meso-America. It is open to all and continues a long tradition within the department of theoretical investigation and documentation of these languages. Current participants are working with speakers of Lake Pátzcuaro P’urhepecha, San Martín Peras Mixtec, Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, and Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec, among other languages.

Co-organized by Lauren McGarry and Maho Morimoto, the group will meet every other Wednesday to discuss papers, hear about participants’ own ongoing research, and hear talks by outside speakers. For the inaugural meeting this coming Wednesday (October 12), Steven Foley will lead a discussion of a paper by Jessica Coon et al. entitled “The Role of Case in A-Bar Extraction Asymmetries: Evidence from Mayan.”

All meetings will take place at 5:30 pm in Stevenson 217. Please email wlma@ucsc.edu with any inquiries or requests to be added to our mailing list.