- Mile End Road
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London - +447902103547
Linnaea Stockall
Queen Mary, University of London, Linguistics, Faculty Member
- Linguistics, Semantics, Language Processing, Languages and Linguistics, Mental Lexicon, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, and 22 moreSyntax, Lexical Semantics, Events, Ambiguity, Sentence Processing, Magnetoencephalography, Cognition, Electrophysiology, Aspect, Eye Movements, Verbs, Allomorphy, Lexical Decision, Irregular Verbs, Sentence Context, Derivational Morphology, Morphology (Languages And Linguistics), Distributed Morphology, Event Semantics, Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Syntax-Semantics Interfaceedit
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ABSTRACT While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the... more
ABSTRACT While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.
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It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we... more
It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch second-language Mandarin Chinese learners’ online processing of syntactic cues to count vs. mass interpretations in Chinese which are unique-to-L2 and never explicitly taught. The results showed that late Dutch–Mandarin learners were sensitive to a mass-biased syntactic cue in real-time processing, and exhibited some native-like anticipatory behaviour. These findings indicate that late L2ers can acquire unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning, and can automatically use this knowledge to make predictions.
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We will conduct a series of masked priming experiments to investigate the morphological parsing of Tagalog infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words. The existing masked priming literature has established that a brief and potentially... more
We will conduct a series of masked priming experiments to investigate the morphological parsing of Tagalog infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words. The existing masked priming literature has established that a brief and potentially unconscious (<60ms) presentation of a morphologically related prime (e.g., teacher) facilitates lexical decision to a target word (e.g., TEACH) as compared to when participants are presented with a completely unrelated prime (e.g., sugar) (see Rastle & Davis, 2008 for summary). Such findings have been taken as evidence supporting the existence of an early morphological parsing process in visual word recognition, in which the primes were rapidly parsed, and the constituent morphemes were subsequently activated, thereby facilitating the lexical decision when the stem is encountered again as a target. Masked priming effects have been observed in well-studied languages like English (Rastle & Davis, 2004, 2008; Rastle et al., 2000), Dutch (Drews & Zwitserlood...
Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers,... more
Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the mass/count distinction is initially computed using phrase structure but can be overridden in cases where the syntax is incompatible with nouns' ontological meanings. The results indicate that in Mandarin Chinese, syntactic cues can be rapidly used to make predictions about upcoming information in real time processing.
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What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both... more
What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classifications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but n...
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Deverbal word formation is subject to two distinct types of constraints , those concerning the syntactic category of the base (categorial constraints) and those relating to the thematic properties of the verb (thematic constraints). For... more
Deverbal word formation is subject to two distinct types of constraints , those concerning the syntactic category of the base (categorial constraints) and those relating to the thematic properties of the verb (thematic constraints). For instance,-able suffixation involves a transitive verb with argument structure , as in to train > trainable. Violation of these constraints results in the creation of pseudo-words with categorial (e.g. riverable) or thematic violations (e.g. arrivable). The study discusses psycholinguistic experiments involving these types of deverbal pseudo-words, in Greek and English, two languages with morphologically distinct properties. Greek has a rich derivational system with a variety of deverbal formations, which follow strong constraints, in the sense that most suffixes that participate in deverbal word formation lack the polysemy that allows them to attach to other-than-verbal bases. English, on the other hand, demonstrates an equally rich derivational s...
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... VP-Internal Event Composition: Processing Evidence for Phrase-Level Event Interpretation E. Matthew Husband, Michigan State University Linnaea Stockall Hampshire College Alan Beretta Michigan State University WORD COUNT: 6844 Please... more
... VP-Internal Event Composition: Processing Evidence for Phrase-Level Event Interpretation E. Matthew Husband, Michigan State University Linnaea Stockall Hampshire College Alan Beretta Michigan State University WORD COUNT: 6844 Please address correspondence to: ...
▶ RESULTS: 3 Level Analysis: a Looking more closely at the dual nouns: main effect of noun type manipulation (pMCMC= 0.012) and frequency (pMCMC= 0.0001); no interaction (pMCMC>. 1) most count-like dual nouns are slower to respond to... more
▶ RESULTS: 3 Level Analysis: a Looking more closely at the dual nouns: main effect of noun type manipulation (pMCMC= 0.012) and frequency (pMCMC= 0.0001); no interaction (pMCMC>. 1) most count-like dual nouns are slower to respond to than the most mass-like dual nouns
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Neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation supports the early decomposition of morphologically complex words within the ventral processing stream, which MEG has localized to the M170 response in the (left) visual word form area (VWFA).... more
Neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation supports the early decomposition of morphologically complex words within the ventral processing stream, which MEG has localized to the M170 response in the (left) visual word form area (VWFA). Decomposition into an exhaustive parse of visual morpheme forms extends beyond words like farmer to those imitating complexity (e.g., brother; Lewis et al., 2011), and to “unique” stems occurring in only one word but following the syntax and semantics of their affix (e.g., vulnerable; Gwilliams & Marantz, 2018). Evidence comes primarily from suffixation; other morphological processes have been under-investigated. This study explores circumfixation, infixation, and reduplication in Tagalog. In addition to investigating whether these are parsed like suffixation, we address an outstanding question concerning semantically empty morphemes. Some words in Tagalog resemble English winter as decomposition is not supported (wint-er); these apparently reduplica...
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Abstract. Generic statements are characteristically associated with two features that distinguish them from universally quantified statements: first, they are tolerant of exceptions, and, second, they are not associated with any overt... more
Abstract. Generic statements are characteristically associated with two features that distinguish them from universally quantified statements: first, they are tolerant of exceptions, and, second, they are not associated with any overt quantifier or determiner. We present data from a timed Truth Value Judgement Task (TVJT) that investigates the consequences of these two features for processing. We discuss these results in the context of recent proposals that generic interpretations are a more 'default ' or 'basic ' kind of interpretation than universal quantification and argue that our results do not support these proposals.
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In this study, we focused on the Generic Overgeneralisation (GOG) effect (Leslie, Khemlani, and Glucksberg 2011) and tested the relevance of context and an explanation based on quantifier domain restriction for the pattern of judgement... more
In this study, we focused on the Generic Overgeneralisation (GOG) effect (Leslie, Khemlani, and Glucksberg 2011) and tested the relevance of context and an explanation based on quantifier domain restriction for the pattern of judgement data observed. Participants judged generic majority characteristic statements like tigers have stripes or statements with universal quantifiers that have different sensitivity to context (‘all’, ‘all the’, ‘each’) preceded by one of three levels of context: a) neutral, where the information in the context does not interact with the truth value of the critical statement, b) contradictory, where it presents an exception which should rule out a universally quantified statement, and c) supportive. Our results suggest that proponents of the generics-as-default view ruled out context prematurely and that in fact context is a viable alternative explanation for much of the so-called GOG effect.
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Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored, and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated... more
Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored, and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated similar issues for functional affixes. In Word or Lexeme Based Morphology (Aronoff 1994), affixes are not representational units on par with stems or roots. This view is in stark contrast to the claims of linguistic theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), which assign rich representational content to affixes. We conducted a series of eight visual lexical decision studies, evaluating effects of derivational affix priming along with stem priming, identity priming, form priming, and semantic priming at long and short lags. We find robust and consistent affix priming (but not semantic or form priming) with lags up to 33 items, supporting the position that affixes are morphemes, i.e., representational units on par with stems. Intriguingly,...
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Two experiments investigated whether 4-and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth "striking") and whether varying the number of... more
Two experiments investigated whether 4-and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth "striking") and whether varying the number of exceptions has any effect on children's willingness to extend a property after having heard a generalization. Moreover, they investigated how the content of a generalization interacts with exception tolerance. Adult data were collected for comparison. We used generalizations to describe novel kinds (e.g., "glippets") that had either a neutral (e.g., "play with toys") or a striking property (e.g., "play with fire") and measured how willing participants were to extend the property to a new instance of the novel kind. Experiment 1 demonstrated that both adults and children show sensitivity to strikingness in that striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, although children extended less than adults overall. The ...
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Generic generalisations (e.g. 'tigers have stripes', 'ducks lay eggs') refer to a characteristic property of a kind. Recently, the generics-as-default view has posited that we have a bias towards interpreting universally... more
Generic generalisations (e.g. 'tigers have stripes', 'ducks lay eggs') refer to a characteristic property of a kind. Recently, the generics-as-default view has posited that we have a bias towards interpreting universally quantified statements as generic. Evidence offered for this view is the Generic Overgeneralisation (GOG) effect, which refers to the documented tendency of participants to misinterpret a quantificational statement like 'all ducks lay eggs' as if it were a generic and thus accept it as true, even though they know it is false. Across two experiments in English and Greek we systematically addressed the relevance of context and quantifier domain restriction for this kind of behaviour. Participants judged generic majority characteristic statements like 'tigers have stripes' or statements with universal quantifiers with different sensitivity to quantifier domain restriction preceded by one of three levels of context (neutral, contradictory ...
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While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as-... more
While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as- default view. In this paper we focus on the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ (GOG) effect proposed by Leslie and colleagues and the native speaker judgments that have been used to support it, and by extension, the generics-as-default view. We take a step back to look at the history of the GOG effect in order to contextualise it. We review existing experimental evidence and discuss four non-mutually exclusive explanations for the GOG effect: ignorance, subkind interpretation, atypical behaviour of all and quantifier domain restriction. We conclude that a closer look at the semantics and pragmatics of generics and universal quantifiers may provide a more nuanced explanation for the pattern of judgment data than that proposed by the generics-as-default view.
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ABSTRACT While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the... more
ABSTRACT While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.
Linguistic events have long been known to systematically differ with respect to whether they proceed to a natural and necessary end point, or not. Semantic and syntactic accounts of these systematic differences disagree as to which kind... more
Linguistic events have long been known to systematically differ with respect to whether they proceed to a natural and necessary end point, or not. Semantic and syntactic accounts of these systematic differences disagree as to which kind of event is more complex, and thus more computationally costly, but both approaches identify the VP (not the verb alone) as the domain for aspectual interpretation. We review the existing processing literature, which is broadly consistent with VP-domain hypotheses but does not address the issue of representational complexity. We present a series of experiments that provide a more detailed look at the time course of aspectual interpretation, providing clear support for the VP hypothesis. We also argue that syntactic and semantic complexity effects can be seen in aspectual processing. Terminative syntactic structure and durative semantic interpretation are both costly.
Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi... more
Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish–English sequential bilinguals. A same–different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi–espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. Ther...
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We revisit a long-standing question in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature on comprehending morphologically complex words: are prefixes and suffixes processed using the same cognitive mechanisms? Recent work using... more
We revisit a long-standing question in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature on comprehending morphologically complex words: are prefixes and suffixes processed using the same cognitive mechanisms? Recent work using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to uncover the dynamic temporal and spatial responses evoked by visually presented complex suffixed single words provide us with a comprehensive picture of morphological processing in the brain, from early, form-based decomposition, through lexical access, grammatically constrained recomposition, and semantic interpretation. In the present study, we find that MEG responses to prefixed words reveal interesting early differences in the lateralization of the form-based decomposition response compared to the effects reported in the literature for suffixed words, but a very similar post-decomposition profile. These results not only address a question stretching back to the earliest days of modern psycholinguistics, but also add critical support and nuance to our much newer emerging understanding of spatial organization and temporal dynamics of morphological processing in the human brain.
▶ RESULTS: 3 Level Analysis: a Looking more closely at the dual nouns: main effect of noun type manipulation (pMCMC= 0.012) and frequency (pMCMC= 0.0001); no interaction (pMCMC>. 1) most count-like dual nouns are slower to respond to than... more
▶ RESULTS: 3 Level Analysis: a Looking more closely at the dual nouns: main effect of noun type manipulation (pMCMC= 0.012) and frequency (pMCMC= 0.0001); no interaction (pMCMC>. 1) most count-like dual nouns are slower to respond to than the most mass-like dual nouns
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In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach to genericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quantification, and a growing body of experimental and developmental work on the topic, mainly by psychologists... more
In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach to genericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quantification, and a growing body of experimental and developmental work on the topic, mainly by psychologists rather than linguists, proposing that genericity is categorically different from (and significantly simpler than) quantification. We argue that this generics-as-default hypothesis is much less well supported by evidence than its supporters contend, and that a research program combining theoretical and experimental research methods and considerations in the same studies is required to make progress.
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Deverbal word formation is subject to two distinct types of constraints, those concerning the syntactic category of the base (categorial constraints) and those relating to the thematic properties of the verb (thematic constraints). For... more
Deverbal word formation is subject to two distinct types of constraints, those concerning the syntactic category of the base (categorial constraints) and those relating to the thematic properties of the verb (thematic constraints). For instance, -able suffixation involves a transitive verb with argument structure <Agent<Theme>>, as in to train > trainable. Violation of these constraints results in the creation of pseudo-words with categorial (e.g. riverable) or thematic violations (e.g. arrivable). The study discusses psycholinguistic experiments involving these types of deverbal pseudo-words, in Greek and English, two languages with morphologically distinct properties. Greek has a rich derivational system with a variety of deverbal formations, which follow strong constraints, in the sense that most suffixes that participate in deverbal word formation lack the polysemy that allows them to attach to other-than-verbal bases. English, on the other hand, demonstrates an equally rich derivational system, but it differs in two crucial ways: (a) there is significant affix homophony (e.g. -er is a nominalizer if attached to verbal stems, or forms the comparative if attached to adjectives), (b) it is extremely permissive in allowing zero-derived verbs (to fax). In an off-line and two on-line lexical decision tasks we investigated whether categorial and thematic constraints are treated in the same way by speakers of both languages. Results showed that speakers of both languages differentiated between pseudo-words that violate these two types of constraints both when it comes to acceptance rates and processing time. Taking together results from both languages, we make claims about the structured mental representation of deverbal derivatives and the fact that their various properties can be accessed via distinct operations and at distinct points of time. Implications for the psycholinguistic theory of lexical access and the morphological theory of word formation are also discussed.
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What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both... more
What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classifications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs.
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This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets... more
This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the
lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish,
Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets pink, rosa, bleikur, lyserød, ceris.
In the 18th century, a particular shade of light red established itself in the cultural life of
people in Western Europe, earning its own independent colour term. In the middle of the
20th century, a second pink category began to spread in a subset of the languages.
Contemporary experimental data from the Evolution of Semantic Systems colour project
(Majid et al., 2011) is analysed in light of the extant historical data on the development of
these colour terms. We find that the current pink situation arose through contact-induced
lexical and conceptual change. Despite the different lexicalization strategies, the terms’
denotation is remarkably similar for the oldest pink category and we investigate the
impact of the advent of the younger and more restricted secondary pink category on the
colour categorization and colour denotations of the languages.
lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish,
Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets pink, rosa, bleikur, lyserød, ceris.
In the 18th century, a particular shade of light red established itself in the cultural life of
people in Western Europe, earning its own independent colour term. In the middle of the
20th century, a second pink category began to spread in a subset of the languages.
Contemporary experimental data from the Evolution of Semantic Systems colour project
(Majid et al., 2011) is analysed in light of the extant historical data on the development of
these colour terms. We find that the current pink situation arose through contact-induced
lexical and conceptual change. Despite the different lexicalization strategies, the terms’
denotation is remarkably similar for the oldest pink category and we investigate the
impact of the advent of the younger and more restricted secondary pink category on the
colour categorization and colour denotations of the languages.
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Abstract Converging evidence from behavioral masked priming (Rastle & Davis, 2008), EEG masked priming (Morris, Frank, Grainger, & Holcomb, 2007) and single word MEG (Zweig & Pylkkänen, 2008) experiments has provided robust support for a... more
Abstract Converging evidence from behavioral masked priming (Rastle & Davis, 2008), EEG masked priming (Morris, Frank, Grainger, & Holcomb, 2007) and single word MEG (Zweig & Pylkkänen, 2008) experiments has provided robust support for a model of lexical processing which includes an early, automatic, visual word form based stage of morphological parsing that applies to all derivationally affixed words.
Research Interests:
While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary... more
While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.