Research Seminars

psycholinguistics seminars

The psycholinguistics lab seminars take place on Mondays at 12h15. 

Please note that all the seminars will be broadcasted via Zoom, contact Olivia Hadjadj if you would like to join.

Next seminar:
Monday, December 19th 2022

Dr. Sandra Villata (NYUAD)

Experimental evidence for gradient effects and their consequences for theories of grammar

A common assumption in linguistics is that grammar is fundamentally binary: sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical, but they cannot have intermediate grammaticality values. As a result, the gradation that we typically observe in empirical measures (e.g. acceptability judgment ratings, response times, electrophysiological responses) is attributed to extra-grammatical factors, such as memory limitations, plausibility factors and so on and so forth. In this talk, I will discuss three sets of experimental studies that challenge these assumptions or some of their implications. I will show that: (i) syntactic violations might be violations to a degree, (ii) sentence processing operations might occur to a degree, and (iii) sentence comprehension might be less flawless that we would expect it to be if the parser were tightly aligned with a binary grammar. After reviewing these results, my hope is to encourage some discussion about the consequences of these findings for theories of grammars, from binary approaches to continuous ones.

Seminars 2022/2023

ARCHIVES:

2021-2022

2020-2021

2019-2020

2018-2019

2017-2018

Fall 2016

Spring 2016

Fall 2015 

For general information, please contact Olivia Hadjadj