LangSci Lunch Talk: Alix Kowalski (HESP)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

The time-course of grammatical role assignment in complex sentences

Interpreting sentences requires comprehenders to answer the basic question of who did what to whom. Previous research has shown that role assignment sometimes occurs early, even before a sentence is linguistically disambiguated from alternate constructions. In contrast, previous work has also shown that role assignment sometimes occurs late, even after linguistic disambiguation. Why do differences in the timing of role assignment occur? In this talk I report on a visual world eye-tracking study that addresses possible accounts for these observed processing differences.