Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday April 19, 16:15, Seminar Room, Building 17

Prediction in Human Sentence Processing: Evidence from Eye-Movements

This talk is concerned with `prediction' processes in human sentence processing. By `prediction', we mean that preceding linguistic items anticipate or narrow down a class of potential subsequent items even before the onset of the subsequent items during parsing. Such operations are not particularly new in the psycholinguistic or computational literature: numerous theories have accommodated a mechanism which enables the parser to expect the next items, often using syntactic knowledge based on phrase structure grammar.

In this talk, we will report three eye-tracking experiments with a `visual world' paradigm in which subjects looked at a picture on a computer screen, as well as listened to a concurrent auditory sentence related to the picture. The technique enables us to `timelock' eye movements relative to certain points of the sentence. In our experiments, we investigate different types of constraints which drive prediction: selectional restrictions of verbs (Expt 1), combination of subject constraints and selectional restrictions (Expt 2), and syntactic information (case-marking information) (Expt 3). We also explore the question of whether constituents before the verb can be used for prediction.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Christoph Scheepers.