Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 23 May 2013, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

Expectations about Upcoming Coherence and Coreference

In order for a discourse to make sense, not only must the individual utterances that comprise the discourse be well–formed but the set of utterances as a whole must come together in a coherent way. Given this, comprehenders of a discourse can reasonably expect that upcoming linguistic material will not appear arbitrarily but rather will relate in meaningful ways to previous utterances. In this talk, I consider two particular types of discourse-level dependencies: the relationships that can be inferred to hold between pairs of sentences (coherence) and the relationships between subsequent mentions of the same entity (coreference). I ask what types of cues – either in the preceding discourse or in properties of the current sentence – can influence comprehenders’ expectations. In addition to more classic pyshcolinguistic methods, I present a new paradigm adapted from infant category–learning research to test whether comprehenders’ eye movements can be used to measure their expectations regarding upcoming sentence types. This work is an attempt to extend existing research that has shown that comprehenders anticipate upcoming relationships between sounds, words, and syntactic structures, asking whether pragmatic outcomes are subject to anticipation as well.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Vera Demberg.