Exploring the Role of Prosody and Discourse Status in the Allocation of Working Memory Resources

The speaker will be Margaret Kroll (University of California, Santa Cruz), whose talk has the title “Exploring the role of prosody and discourse status in the allocation of working memory resources”.

ABSTRACT.  This project presents experimental evidence that challenges a view of discourse processing in which primary and secondary discourse content rely on different sets of working memory resources. Under the assumption that restrictive relatives and appositives differ in contributing primary and secondary discourse content, respectively, recent findings by Dillon et al. (2014, 2017) that acceptability ratings are more sensitive to the length of restrictive relatives than to the length of appositives support a model of discourse processing in which the parsing operations that construct primary and secondary discourse content proceed independently.  However, the assumption that appositives always contribute secondary discourse content has been challenged in recent work (Simons et al. 2010, AnderBois et al. 2011, Koev & Syrett 2014, among others).  We present a new experimental design that controls the discourse status of appositive content, allowing us to directly test whether it is the discourse status of appositives and restrictive relatives that is driving the observed acceptability differences.  We find that, counter to the predictions of Dillon et al., acceptability ratings show the same sensitivity to appositive length whether the appositive contributes primary or secondary discourse content.  We argue that the observed acceptability differences between restrictive relatives and appositives cannot be attributed to the discourse status of appositive content, and explore an alternative explanation in which the differences are due to the burdening of particular prosodic domains.

Margaret Kroll is a doctoral student in linguistics, whose research interests lie in pragmatics, semantics, their interface, and philosophy of language — with an occasional foray into psycholinguistics.











When: Tue., Nov. 14, 2017 at 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave.
212-817-7000
Price: Free
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The speaker will be Margaret Kroll (University of California, Santa Cruz), whose talk has the title “Exploring the role of prosody and discourse status in the allocation of working memory resources”.

ABSTRACT.  This project presents experimental evidence that challenges a view of discourse processing in which primary and secondary discourse content rely on different sets of working memory resources. Under the assumption that restrictive relatives and appositives differ in contributing primary and secondary discourse content, respectively, recent findings by Dillon et al. (2014, 2017) that acceptability ratings are more sensitive to the length of restrictive relatives than to the length of appositives support a model of discourse processing in which the parsing operations that construct primary and secondary discourse content proceed independently.  However, the assumption that appositives always contribute secondary discourse content has been challenged in recent work (Simons et al. 2010, AnderBois et al. 2011, Koev & Syrett 2014, among others).  We present a new experimental design that controls the discourse status of appositive content, allowing us to directly test whether it is the discourse status of appositives and restrictive relatives that is driving the observed acceptability differences.  We find that, counter to the predictions of Dillon et al., acceptability ratings show the same sensitivity to appositive length whether the appositive contributes primary or secondary discourse content.  We argue that the observed acceptability differences between restrictive relatives and appositives cannot be attributed to the discourse status of appositive content, and explore an alternative explanation in which the differences are due to the burdening of particular prosodic domains.

Margaret Kroll is a doctoral student in linguistics, whose research interests lie in pragmatics, semantics, their interface, and philosophy of language — with an occasional foray into psycholinguistics.

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