Synopsis and Design

(following text just ripped from Fine et al., under review)

Kaschak and Glenberg investigate how exposure to non-standard needs+participle sentences, as in (1), which are common in some American dialects, affects processing of the standard use of needs+participle, as in (2), where the participle is a modifier to the noun.

(1) The meal needs cooked given that dinner is in an hour. (non-standard needs) (2) The meal needs cooked vegetables to make it complete. (modifier)

The episodic processing proposal advanced by Kaschak and Glenberg predicts that readers will initially misparse sentences such as (1) as having the more frequent modifier structure (i.e., they are garden-pathed). This retrieval should subsequently facilitate processing of that modifier structure, even though the modifier interpretation is ultimately ruled out. In several reading experiments, Kaschak and Glenberg find that repeated exposure to the temporarily ambiguous non-standard structure, compared to repeated exposure to the unambiguous standard needs to be+participle structure in (3), facilitates later processing of both the non-standard needs structure (1) and the modifier structure (2), in line with the episodic processing account.

(3) The meal needs to be cooked given that dinner is in an hour. (standard needs)

What does the episodic processing account say about MV/RC ambiguity? Consider a temporarily ambiguous sentence of the kind employed in the experiments reported above.

(4) The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid.

The episodic processing proposal advanced by Kaschak and Glenberg predicts that, in sentences such as (4), subjects will initially retrieve the MV representation at the verb warned, since there is a stronger a priori expectation for this structure than for the RC structure, and, crucially, this retrieval should subsequently facilitate processing of that structure, even though the MV interpretation is ultimately ruled out. This prediction is not supported by our experiments. On the contrary, Experiment 2 from Fine et al. finds that repeated exposure to RCs leads to slower processing of MVs (as predicted by the hypothesis advanced here).

It is likely that both "episodic processing" and statistical learning are operative in rapid syntactic adaptation, but that the two processes are engaged to different degrees depending on properties of the materials used. This experiment tries to being to tease apart these two processes. Specifically, we ask what happens when subjects are exposed to unambiguous RCs only (as in (8)). If adaptation is purely a matter of subjects incrementally updating the parameters of a probability distribution over syntactic structures, then exposure to unambiguous RCs should have the same effect on the subsequent comprehension of MVs as exposure to both ambiguous and unambiguous RCs.

This experiment exploits the MV/RC ambiguity, illustrated in (5)-(8).

(5) MV: The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers before the midnight raid.

(6) RC: The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid.

(7) MV (unambiguous): The experienced soldiers spoke about the dangers before the midnight raid.

(8) RC (unambiguous): The experienced soldiers who were told about the dangers conducted the midnight raid.