Research Groups: Friday, November 6

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
1. Breanna Pratley (MA 2020): "Can English idioms undergo the dative alternation? A priming investigation."

Many analyses support that the English Double Object and Prepositional Dative are syntactically and semantically distinct. The observation that idioms do not alternate between these structures is used as evidence for this distinction; however, examples of dative idioms in both forms exist in natural language corpora. In principle, this would invalidate their use as evidence for a distinction. Bruening (2010) proposes an account, called Rightward Dative Shift, that retains the Double Object structure in idioms that appear to alternate. This analysis maintains that idioms can only have one structure, and therefore can continue to be used as evidence of a complete distinction between dative structures. To adjudicate between these analyses, we conducted a two-alternative forced-choice syntactic priming experiment. Significant priming effects were found in Active/Passive filler trials, confirming task validity. Prepositional Dative primes resulted in significantly more Prepositional Dative responses than Double Object primes, as predicted. The Rightward Dative Shift results are inconclusive but warrant further investigation.

2. Frederick Gietz (Ph.D.): "Measuring speakers' understanding of complement coercion."

In this talk, I present data from a crowdsourcing experiment which I argue supports a view of coercion as a non-categorical phenomenon. Complement coercion in the psycholinguistics and semantics literature typically involves an entity-type noun filling argument role reserved for an event type object, through a costly process of type-shift. This manifests in increased reading times for entity-type arguments in coercion sentences. Our crowdsourcing data and distributional work instead shows that middle-ground cases, not clearly entity or event, pattern between cases classically labeled coercion or non-coercion.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Kelly-Ann Blake (Ph.D.): "Phonetic convergence during online conversational interaction: Do greater differences lead to greater convergence patterns?"

Phonetic convergence is the phenomenon in which interlocutors adopt each other's speech characteristics unconsciously. Recent studies using speech shadowing and conversational interaction tasks have presented mixed evidence for convergence patterns (e.g., male versus female speakers, same-sex pairs versus m-f pairs, high versus low frequency words, and monosyllabic versus bisyllabic words). The current study uses an online conversational map task to determine whether convergence occurs when pairs start with larger differences in their speech patterns.