Dr. Hannah Rohde
Most models of sentence processing focus on how comprehenders establish relationships between words to form a sentence. However, for successful language comprehension, comprehenders must also establish relationships between sentences in order to form larger discourse structures. This talk addresses the question of whether comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming discourse continuations, and furthermore whether those expectations have an impact on sentence-internal phenomena such as coreference and the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. As an example, consider (1): (1) Mary scolded Jane. She kicked her. Several different relationships can be inferred to hold between the two sentences in (1), and the different relationships in turn yield different interpretations of the two pronouns. In the case of (1), an 'Explanation relation' supports the reading in which Jane kicked Mary, whereas a narrative 'Occasion relation' supports the reading in which first Mary scolded Jane and then, on top of that, Mary also kicked her. In this talk, I identify several factors that influence comprehenders' expectations about what the operative intersentential coherence relation is likely to be in a given passage. For an example like (1), the presence of a so-called 'implicit-causality' verb (scold) contributes to the likelihood of an Explanation relation, which in turn supports the pattern of pronoun interpretation in which it was Jane who kicked Mary. The results of a set of off-line and on-line experiments fit within a larger picture of expectation-driven processing in language comprehension. Previous work has shown that comprehenders are sensitive to statistical regularities at the level of sounds, words, and syntactic structures; the experiments presented here provide the first evidence of expectation-driven processing at the discourse level as well.
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