Sentence
Processing 1
Processing 1
True or False:
The following sentence is in the passive voice.
The squirrel was eating my sandwich.
False, this is an active voice sentence!
What kind of verb complement does the verb, accept, have in the following example?
The avengers accepted that ironman is dead
A. Noun phrase
B. Sentence/Clausal
B. Sentence/Clausal; the complement is a complete sentence, that ironman is dead
True or False
According to the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines the way we perceive the world.
False
What is the basic principle underlying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Linguistic relativity; Language determines (strong) or influences (weak) the way we perceive the world and conceptualize.
True or false:
Ferreira (2003) found that the passive voice had the slowest response time and lowest accuracy.
True
Consider the sentence below. Which of the following statements is true?
"Our fish wears a shirt."
A. shirt would have a high cloze probability in this sentence
B. People may have a P600 response when reading the sentence
C. shirt would have a high surprisal in this sentence
D. People may have a N400 response when reading the sentence
E. All of the above
c & d
C. shirt would have a high surprisal in this sentence
D. People may have a N400 response when reading the sentence
What kind of ambiguity is present in the sentence "While Tom was washing the dishes fell on the floor"? Explain why.
Temporary ambiguity; garden path sentence.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis predicts that those without a separate word for yellow, black, and red:
will not be able to discriminate between these three colors
will not see the colors at all (those objects appear colorless)
will call Ticonderoga pencils red
will experience initial color naming difficulty in an L2 with separate words for these colors
1. will not be able to discriminate between these three colors
Spanish is language that has linguistic gender. When Spanish speakers are asked to decide
whether two object pictures belong to the same category that have mismatched gender, they will:
A. categorize them equally fast as those who have the same gender
B. categorize them faster than objects who have the same gender
C. categorize them faster if they are semantically related
D. categorize them slower than objects who have the same gender
D. categorize them slower than objects who have the same gender
Consider the headline below. Identify (a) the kind of ambiguity for the headline and (b) explain why
Is Fish Heart Healthy Food? It Depends.
Temporary ambiguity (garden path sentence); Instead of grouping fish heart as a unit, it is whether fish a food that is healthy for heart
Where did Husband 2022 find significantly slower reaction times?
Expected articles and unexpected nouns
Unexpected nouns only
Unexpected articles only
Both unexpected nouns and articles
4. Both unexpected nouns and articles
Fill in the blanks
When reading a sentence like, “The athlete pulled a muscle in his leg during the competition,” we wouldn’t expect a N400 effect when participants read muscle because it has __________ cloze probability and _________ surprisal.
When reading a sentence like, “The athlete pulled a muscle in his leg during the competition,” we wouldn’t expect a N400 effect when participants read muscle because it has ___high__ cloze probability and __low_____ surprisal.
In Spanish, the agent is less likely to be included in the sentence describing the event. After watching a video of a man unintentionally breaking a vase, a native Spanish speaker would be ________ to recall the person who did it compared to a native English speaker.
a) less likely
b) more likely
c) equally likely
a) less likely
True or False:
A speaker of a language who does not distinguish between green and blue will have higher accuracy in discriminating shades of blue than a speaker of a language that distinguishes between green and blue.
False
Which of the following is NOT an advantage of Maze Task in comparison to ERPs with EEG?
Easier to run on larger/broader populations
More natural linguistic presentation
Less expensive
Possible to run via the web
2. More natural linguistic presentation
Based on ERP studies of language predictability, which sentence would likely generate the largest N400 effect in response to the underlined word?
The knitter dropped his needle.
They ran across the street.
The skier fell off the yarn.
She stopped by the school to pick up her niece.
3. The skier fell of the yarn.
Which of the following statement can best describe the constraint-based model?
A. It is mostly based on heuristics.
B. It predicts that all the garden path sentences would be difficult to process.
C. The process of meaning selection is an interaction among different variables.
D. Only one meaning is available for initial activation in the processing.
C. The process of meaning selection is an interaction among different variables.
Athanasopoulos et al. (2010) found that native Greek speakers are faster than native English
speakers at distinguishing between certain shades of blue. If a Greek speaker lived in the U.S.A for 5 years, they would likely:
a. distinguish blues at the same rate (as before living in U.S.A.)
b. distinguish blues at a slower rate
c. lose their ability to distinguish certain shades of blue
b. distinguish blues as a slower rate
Mandarin speakers who have lived in America (an English speaking country) will talk about time..
A. always according to their native language (in Mandarin; vertical timelines)
B. always according to English (horizontal timelines)
C. differently according to the cultural context (vertical vs. horizontal)
C. differently according to the cultural context (vertical vs. horizontal)
Explain at least one study that supports the influence of language on perception (weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
Color perception studies; time perception studies.
Which sentence processing model only makes use of heuristics and syntactic rules/structures?
syntactic model
constraint-based model
garden path model
TRACE model
3. garden path model
Why did Husband (2022) find slower reaction times for the unexpected article in addition to the unexpected word?
Because participants expected the article form associated with the predicted word (e.g. a for kite vs an for airplane).
Kay and Kempton's 1984 study investigated judgments of color similarity by speakers of
English and speakers of Tarahumara, a language that does not have separate names for blue
and green. They found that English speakers:
a. differentiated less clearly than Tarahumara speakers between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English.
b. differentiated more clearly than Tarahumara speakers between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English.
c. had similar judgments to Tarahumara speakers regarding the difference between two
colors that would be labeled blue and green in English.
b. differentiated more clearly than Tarahumara speakers between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English.
Experiments showing that Whorfian effects are diminished or eliminated when the linguistic
system is inhibited provide:
A. strong and conclusive evidence that speakers of different languages perceive the world differently.
B. some evidence for the causal role of language on perception, but perceptual differences between speakers of different languages seem limited.
C. strong evidence that language is shaped by perception rather than the other way around.
D. no evidence one way or another regarding the relationship between language and
perception.
B. some evidence for the causal role of language on perception, but perceptual differences between speakers of different languages seem limited.
Consider the following pair of sentence. What would be the most possible variable that may influence the processing difficulty?
(a) The window broke his hand because he slammed it shut too fast.
(b) Her husband broke his hand because he slammed it down too hard on the table.
1. Verb frame frequency
2. Argument structure
3. Verb voice frequency
4. Thematic relations
4. Thematic relations