Tuesday, February 3, 2015

The lab hits the road this spring!

Here are some of the lab presentations that you will see at conferences this spring:

28th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing:
University of Southern California (Los Angeles)

   "On the universality of adjunct islands: Evidence from Malayalam"
     Savithry Namboodiripad and Grant Goodall

   "Subject islands are subject islands (even when the subject is a wh-filler)"
     Grant Goodall

33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics:
Simon Fraser University (Vancouver)

   "Prosody and the that-trace effect: An experimental study"
     Amanda Ritchart, Grant Goodall and Marc Garellek



Winter '15 meetings

Our meetings this quarter are on Mondays at noon.

Jan. 12
Haegeman, L., Jiménez-Fernández, Á. & Radford, A. (2014). Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation. The Linguistic Review, 31(1), pp. 73-150.   Part 1 (link)

Jan. 26
Haegeman, L., Jiménez-Fernández, Á. & Radford, A. (2014). Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation. The Linguistic Review, 31(1), pp. 73-150.   Part 2 (link)

Feb. 2
Almeida, Diogo. "Subliminal wh-islands in Brazilian Portuguese and the consequences for syntactic theory." (link)

Feb. 9
Discussion of processing overload and its effects on acceptability, with special reference to wh-islands. 

Feb. 23
Savi will give us a preview of her CUNY poster called On the universality of adjunct islands: Evidence from Malayalam.

Mar. 2
Amanda will give us a preview of her WCCFL talk (with Marc and Grant) on Prosody and the that-trace effect: an experimental study.   

Mar. 9
Grant will give us a preview of his CUNY poster on Subject islands are still islands (even when the subject is a wh-filler).

New publication

Grant Goodall just published an article in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences in a special volume on Encoding and navigating linguistic representations in memory, edited by Claudia Felser, Colin Phillips, and Matthew Wagers:

  • Goodall G (2015) The D-linking effect on extraction from islands and non-islands. Front. Psychol5:1493.  (link)



Fall '14 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter are on Mondays at 9:00am.

Oct. 20
Discussion of D-linking, islands, grammar and processing.

Oct. 27
Jon Sprouse, Ivano Caponigro, Ciro Greco, and Carlo Cecchetto. "Experimental syntax and the cross-linguistic variation of island effects in English and Italian."  Part 1  (link)

Nov. 3
Jon Sprouse, Ivano Caponigro, Ciro Greco, and Carlo Cecchetto. "Experimental syntax and the cross-linguistic variation of island effects in English and Italian."  Part 2  (link)

Nov. 10
Mahowald, K., Graff, P., Hartman, J., & Gibson, E. SNAP Judgments: A Small N Acceptability Paradigm (SNAP) for Linguistic Acceptability Judgments. (link)

Nov. 17
Masaya Yoshida, Jiyeon Lee & Michael Walsh Dickey (2013). The island (in)sensitivity of sluicing and sprouting. In Jon Sprouse and Norbert Hornstein (eds.) Experimental Syntax and Island Effects. Cambridge University Press.

Dec. 1
Discussion of Savi's experiment on Malayalam.

The lab goes to Edinburgh!

Two lab-related projects were presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference in Edinburgh, Scotland:

Working memory influences processing of whether-islands: The N400 reflects gap predictability in high span readers
Dan Michel, Robert Kluender, Seana Coulson


Gaps within fillers are not better than gaps within subjects
Grant Goodall

Dan Michel defends dissertation!

Dan Michel defended his dissertation, entitled Individual Cognitive Measures and Working Memory Accounts of Syntactic Island Phenomena, on June 23. Congratulations, Dan!!!