Saturday, October 7, 2023

Fall 2023 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays, 11:30 - 1:00. 

October 13
We'll start the quarter off by reading the following recent article:
Fukuda, S., Ono, H., Tanaka, N., & Sprouse, J. (2023). Re-examining Island Effects with NP-scrambling in Japanese: The Effect of Individual Variation. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 30.

Friday, April 7, 2023

Spring 2023 lab meetings

Grant is on sabbatical this quarter, so we are having meetings only occasionally.

April 14
Duk-Ho will walk us through his recent self-paced reading experiment on adjunct wh-dependencies.

May 19
Yourdanis Sedarous and Savi Namboodiripad, both of Univ. of Michigan, will be our guests this time as they present their recent work on the effects of prosody and cliticization on resumptive pronouns. 


Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Friday, January 27, 2023

Alex goes CAMPing at UCLA!

Alex Rodríguez is presenting his recent work on long-distance dependencies in Spanish ("Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps") at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, to be held at UCLA, Jan. 28-29.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Winter 2023 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be on Tuesdays, 3:00-4:00.

January 17
For our first lab meeting this quarter, Maho will walk us through the results of her latest experiment, which looks at crossed vs. nested dependencies. Her experiment asks whether there is a perceptible effect on acceptability, once all the confounds are controlled for. 

January 24
Alex will give a practice version of his upcoming talk for CAMP (the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (https://sites.google.com/view/camp5-ucla), happening at UCLA next weekend). The talk has to do with the locality constraints on two long-distance dependencies in Spanish: wh-movement and Clitic Left Dislocation (like topicalization, but with a resumptive clitic pronoun). Alex's experimental work suggests that the two sets of constraints are overlapping, but not identical. 

February 14
Our meetings resume this week with a presentation by Seoyeon on an experiment that she is currently preparing on echo questions in Korean, trying to determine whether echo questions with multiple wh-words (e.g. "WHO bought WHAT?") in Korean allow for pair-list and functional answers. This is very much work in progress, so Seoyeon is hoping for lots of suggestions and feedback!

February 21
This week, Alex and Maho will give us previews of their posters for HSP next month:

Maho: "Island effects persist despite context: The case of double relatives in Japanese"

Maho: "Crossed vs. nested dependencies and crosslinguistic variability in islands"

Alex: "Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps"

They can run us through their posters and we can give them feedback both on the content and on the poster design (everybody loves to critique a poster!).

February 28
A doubleheader today:
  • Duk-Ho will give us an overview of the "flow" for his planned dissertation. His work over the last couple of years has been on ellipsis (sprouting, in particular) and on strong vs. weak islands, and he will show us the threads that tie these areas together.
  • Grant will give us a quick preview of work he is doing on the "P-trace" effect.
March 6 (Monday)
Special Open House edition: Alex, Duk-Ho, and Maho will give prospective students an overview of their work on experimental syntax.

March 21
For our last meeting of the quarter, Maho will walk us through her plans for an upcoming experiment on scrambling in Japanese.

Friday, October 7, 2022

Fall 2022 lab meetings

We will meet this quarter on Fridays at 1:00.

October 7
We'll discuss this recent article:

Tian Q, Park M-K and Yang X (2022) Mandarin Chinese wh-in-situ argument–adjunct asymmetry in island sensitivity: Evidence from a formal judgment study. Front. Psychol. 13:954175.   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.954175

This is a reaction (and rebuttal) to an article that we read last Fall:

Lu, J., Thompson, C. K., & Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese wh-in-situ and islands: A formal judgment study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760257/pdf

October 14
We'll talk about this recent article, on the island sensitivity of NP-scrambling in Japanese:

Fukuda, S. & Tanaka, N. & Ono, H. & Sprouse, J., (2022) “An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5737

October 21
This week we'll discuss Gisbert Fanselow's chapter on grammar and processing in The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax.

October 28
We'll get started this week on our discussion of the Villata & Tabor article that just appeared in Cognition:

Villata, S., & Tabor, W. (2022). A self-organized sentence processing theory of gradience: The case of islands. Cognition, 222, 104943.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027721003668?via%3Dihub

November 4
Continued discussion of the Villata & Tabor article!

November 18
Alex will give us an overview of his recent experiment on CLLD in Spanish.

December 2
For our final lab meeting of the quarter, Duk-Ho will walk us through some preliminary results from his new experiment on extraction of arguments vs. adjuncts. These are usually claimed to be different in certain crucial ways (e.g., all islands block adjunct extraction, but only some islands block argument extraction), but the data are subtle and maybe even suspect, so Duk-Ho has been exploring this topic by means of a formal experiment.